Porting a program to another system is seldom an easy task. If you had the good fortune to be able to consistently use cross-platform libraries while writing the original program, you might be able to get away without having to do any code rewriting. Otherwise, you're looking at significant rewrites ahead. Multi-Platform development can help avoid this, but if the developers are rushed, the version for the system with which they're least-familiar will likely suffer.

To qualify the program as a Porting Disaster, one or more of the following major points has to be present:

Poor quality visuals, audio, or controls which can't be excused by the host system's technical limitations.

Clumsy controls, even if you try to forget the old control layout. For example, imitating pad control badly on a keyboard or touch screen, not supporting mice or customised control setups in a console-to-PC port, trying to cram too many hotkey functions onto controller buttons in a PC-to-console port, or forgetting entirely that a console-to-PC port even has a keyboard at its disposal.

A common problem with the graphics in console-to-PC ports is the field of view: A narrow FOV that makes sense for playing on a TV on the other side of the room can and often does cause motion sickness when played on a desktop monitor. (The same reason, in fact, that console gamers are advised to sit a reasonable distance from the TV in the first place.) It's particularly an issue with first-person games.

Substantial amounts of missing content, such as whole levels, playable characters/vehicles, weapons, and the like. This was frequent with ports to early Nintendo systems, certain things used to get changed around with no overall impact on quality (such as removing crosses or direct mentions of God and Death), but when the change was notable to the casual observer (e.g., "wait, wasn't there a cool hovercraft minigame between these two areas in the original version of this game?"), then it became significant.

Also, keep in mind that "ports" for earlier systems may not be technically considered as ports but rather as conversions. Video game hardware of the late seventies to the mid-nineties tend to differ dramatically from one system to another, and while that may still hold true with today's consoles, the lack of cross-platform libraries, platform-specific behaviour (the Atari 2600's video hardware was vastly different compared to the ones on the NES and arcade systems) and the generally low-level nature of programming them would account for at least some disasters.

Contrast Polished Port, where a game is greatly improved during the development of a ported version and Arcade Perfect Port, where a ported arcade game appears identical from source arcade to destination console/computer.

Please only add examples of games that contain game-breaking bugs or are broken to the point of unplayability, not minor glitches or annoyances.

open/close all folders

Disastrous ports to game consoles:

Amiga/Amiga CD 32

Battletoads was released in 1994, two years after an Amiga version was announced. It cuts out half of the stages and butchers the control scheme to fit on a single-button joystick, and has barely altered graphics which, in some ways, actually look worse than the vibrant NES original. The CD32 version is a straight copy of the Amiga version and shares all of its faults (including playing either the music only or sound effects without music, a common quirk of desktop Amiga games), not even using two buttons on the CD32's six-button controller.

X-COM: UFO Defense, partially because of using a joypad to control it.note It's possible to plug a mouse into the console, though. The main problem, however, is the fact that the CD32 only has 1 KB of memory available for save data. Not only is the player limited to building a single base, the save data takes up the entire space, preventing the player from saving data from another game without deleting it.

Atari 2600

Defender had horrible flicker, blocky cityscape graphics, and a game-breaking invisibility glitch when you fire. The player has to go off-screen to use hyperspace or the Smart Bomb. The later superior port of Stargate (Defender II), which used both joysticks for the controls, showed that this was inexcusable. Not that using two joysticks at once, especially the 2600's joysticks, isn't without its own issues.

Double Dragon was released at a time when Atari relaunched the 2600 as a cheaper alternative to the NES and Master System. It never stood a chance with its stick figure graphics and simplistic mechanics as a result of the system having only a single-button joystick.

Miner 2049er was back-ported by Tigervision from Atari 8-Bit Computers to the Atari 2600, so the downgraded graphics and reduced number of stages (two releases with three each) were to be expected. That walking was slow and jumps could barely clear enemies had no such excuse.

Pac-Man, quite possibly the reigning king of infamously bad porting jobs and one of the major players in The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. Being the most popular arcade game of its day, Atari knew that having the home version on their system could be a license to print money for them, so they wanted the game on their hands as fast as possible, released the unfinished alpha version as soon as it was done, bugs and all (the game couldn't even draw all the ghosts on-screen at once, instead having them flicker in and out of existence), and manufactured 12 million copies of it (2 million more than the userbase at the time, believing that the game would boost hardware sales too). The end result was a complete disaster for Atari. And yet the buggy mess of a game was still the best-selling game on the 2600, ever (7 million copies). A pile of these, along with the equally disastrous E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, were buried in the New Mexico desert, creating a famous urban legend until they were unearthed in early 2014.

The later ports of Ms. Pac-Man and Junior Pac-Man were handled far better: Junior Pac-Man in particular had vertically scrolling mazes and (still-primitive graphics aside) matched nearly every feature of the arcade original, minus the between-stage intermissions. In fact, Ms. Pac-Man was so much better that it got a Game Mod that turned it into Pac-Man Arcade, showing that it was indeed possible to make a good version of Pac-Man for the 2600. And there's also a homebrew called Pac-Man 4K by Dennis Debro that's even closer to the arcade original, using only four kilobytes of memory.

The original Pac-Man port was also a victim of Executive Meddling. The infamous color palette was a result of Atari forcing all games that weren't set in space to not use black backgrounds, as they wanted to showcase the color capabilities of the Atari. Of course, this backfired when Pac-Man on the 2600 ended up as ugly as it did.

Intellivision (INTV)

All of Coleco's games for the Intellivision qualify. All suffered graphics that look like the 2600 and nothing like the Arcade (Turbo's buildings look very blocky even by system standards) and missing stages (50m and 75m in Donkey Kong for example). Zaxxon suffered the worst of them all, replacing the isometric perspective with a top down, removing what made the original fun. When they were released, Mattel claimed that these ports were deliberate sabotage on the part of Coleco. Carl Mueller Jr. later proved that a better version of Donkey Kong could be programmed for the Intellivision by developing the homebrew Donkey Kong Arcade.

Atari 5200

Gorf had some of the worst controls on the Atari 5200, a system with an analog stick that was notoriously problematic to begin with.

Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/Family Computer (Famicom)

The majority of the NES arcade ports developed by Micronics, a contractual developer that used to develop games for other companies during the 80's and early 90's:

1942 suffers from slowdown issues and other flaws. That's not all—the March of Midway, originally a track comprised of marching and whistling, replaces the whistling with beeping.

Athena turned what was a passable arcade game into what is widely regarded as one of the worst NES games. The original arcade version's graphics were translated into a parade of flicker and slowdown, and the controls were made worse.

Ikari Warriors used a rotary joystick system in arcades, allowing players to control their character's movement and aim separately. This control system wouldn't have worked out on the NES controller, which only had a cross-shaped d-pad, so naturally Micronics took it out so that the player aims in the same direction their character is moving. Unfortunately, they did this the worst way possible. Instead of instantly turning around, the player does a full rotation while moving at the same time, causing them to walk in a circle just to turn around. It doesn't help matters that the rest of the game isn't hot either, with bland graphics and lots of flickering.

Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road, in addition to having the same issues that plagued the first Ikari game on the NES, has loading times when the player switches to the status screen after pausing the game. Additionally, there's an unskippable cutscene when the game is left on the title screen for too long, which is made worse by how slowly typed-out the text is.

720 Degrees had horrible graphics, ear-bleeding music, and broken controls (spinning and other moves are frustrating to pull off, and the ramp event is nearly unplayable). To add insult to injury, they took out the expert mode. Inexcusable — the NES can do considerably better than this. This is about as bad as the Taiwanese pirate ports. And it was licensed, made when Tengen still had a contract with Nintendo.

Aladdin fares rather badly. While the bootleg port by Super Game still had graphical and control problems, the official port by NMS Software suffered from these flaws to a greater extent. But it got worse when another pirate original version, Aladdin II, was released....

Conan: The Mysteries of Time, a licensed port of a classic C64 game by System 3 titled Myth: History in the Making, suffered from poor play mechanics, graphics and music compared to the original C64 release. Conan has been derided by many NES players, not all of whom are familiar with the C64 original.

Ghostbusters, a port of Activision's computer game, is infamous for the screwed-up driving sequences and the nearly impossible stairway sequence.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (the Ubisoft release, not the earlier version released by Taito) was a port of a PC action game, which NMS Software saddled with horrendously grainy graphics seemingly produced by taking the graphics from the Sega Master System version and compressing the palette.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was based on the Atari arcade game, but like some other arcade-to-NES conversions, it became a Reformulated Game rather than a straight port. Indy could now jump and use alternate weapons, but the controls for these were clumsy. Whereas the arcade game told players right on the screen what needs to be done, stage goals in the NES version were bewilderingly unintuitive. The graphics are also very poor for the NES, with the backgrounds consisting of hideous washes of blue or green.

King's Quest V: Novotrade tried their hardest to cram 256-color visuals into an 8-bit cart and quick mouse actions onto a controller, but it just couldn't be done well. Have a look.

The Last Ninja, an unnumbered port of the C64 game by System 3 titled Last Ninja 2, was handled by the same team that worked on Conan and suffered from the same issues. To make matters worse: Matt Gray, the guy who composed the music in the original C64 version, also did music for a number of Codemasters' NES games, including Fantastic Dizzy and Micro Machines. But they couldn't bother to hire him for this one; instead, they wrote new music in-house at Beam Software. (This company also made the execrable Back to the Future game with its severely limited BGM.)

Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe's Brother has choppy framerates, horrible graphics and music, and watered-down play mechanics. It plays like one of those unlicensed pirate games. Another reformulation rather than a direct port, and a bad one at that.

Winter Games forced the player to watch a subpar animation sequence that couldn't be skipped, and had a selection of games that was far inferior to the Atari 2600 version. (Yeah, that's right — the NES version of the game is worse than the Atari 2600 version. Let that sink in.) The badly animated, detail-lacking graphics and unresponsive control scheme are quite bad for the NES.

NES/Famicom (pirate originals)

Cony Soft is infamous for their ports being disastrous. So much that none of their games can be considered playable. Even those outside the list.

Their version of Street Fighter II. It has bleepy music, ridiculous hand-drawn graphics, AI that always spams Hadokens, and broken hit detection. There are the 8 playable characters from the original game, but, considering the above statements, it doesn't help. There is also a mad amount of flickering. The Street Fighter V and VI rips are even worse.

Mortal Kombat V Turbo and Mortal Kombat V plus Trilogy, ports of parts one and three respectively. Just about the only good thing you can say about these ports is that they have fatalities, but good luck pulling them off thanks to the awful controls. What's worse is that the latter game uses the B button to block, meaning that you can only kick while jumping.

Also, the Frogger port lacks the music the original game had and ends the level when you get two frogs across instead of five.

Hosenkan Electronics also made ports of popular 16-bit games, and most of them fit this trope:

Pocohontas (AKA Pocohontos). Unfinished and slow. Super Game's version did it better.

Contra Spirits, also known as Super Contra 3. It's slow, some of the weapons were removed, the graphics are generally poor and level 5 from the original was replaced with a palette swap of level 3 (which is actually level 2 in this version). On the plus side, it did at least have the bike chase level, which was removed in the Game Boy version.

Super Donkey Kong, which is actually based on Donkey Kong Land on the Game Boy. The controls are sluggish and the game only has five levels, which repeat several times. The graphics seem to be the original SNES prerendered graphics with reduced color, and overall, the game looks fine compared to the SNES original.

Mickey Mania 7. The graphics were inevitably butchered due to the system limitations, the game can feasibly be beaten in less than 15 minutes and the loading screens were ported from the SNES version for no apparent reason. The only favourable point is that it has the rotating tower level that wasn't in that version.

The Toy Story port has only five levels from the original game and can be beaten in under 10 minutes. The Engrish during the cutscenes doesn't help.

Hummer Team a.k.a. Somari Team a.k.a. Yoko Soft a.k.a. Copyright. Infamous for lots of par and subpar ports of the existing games and for really squeaky sound engine... which pulled out some good music once a year. A surprising number of their ports manage to avert this trope.

While they made a decent port, Hummer's first port of Street Fighter II qualifies, with only four characters playable, and the fifth (Bison/Vega, renamed Viga) as the final boss. As well as this, some of the characters' sizes were questionable. Also, the endings weren't the same as they were originally, but filled with loads and loads of typos. Just look. An updated version of this game, Master Fighter VI, added the rest of the characters (along with a clone of each), made the bosses playable and replaced most of the graphics with those from Super Fighter III. However, the endings from the original port were replaced with a generic congratulations screen.

Street Fighter Alpha. The problem with graphics was solved, but infinite supers and repetitive gameplay killed the cat.

King of Fighters '96 falls into a similar migraine. Even Word of God states that they were planning to make J.Y. Company release it with more characters, but something went wrong so it was never released per se... while the Obvious Beta build was sent to Ka Sheng instead.

Tekken 2 (which is actually a port of the first game) is no better, and essentially plays like their other fighting games without the projectiles.

The port of the first Mortal Kombat game is not clearly a disaster, considering there are far worse ports on Game Boy and Sega Master System, but it includes Sub-Zero throwing "hadoukens" instead of ice balls.

Mortal Kombat II, now known as Mortal Kombat II Special, averts this in many aspects by adding blood (although fatalities are still conspicuously missing) and making the special moves more in line with the original game.

Super Mario World is a very strange case. The graphics are surprisingly good, resembling the original SNES sprites, and the game even proved Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario series, wrong on one point — Miyamoto stated that Yoshi was impossible to program on the NES. Hummer Team put forth impressive effort. This all said, the music was ear-bleeding at times; the jumping physics were not accurately ported, making certain levels all but impossible; and finally, the cartridge doesn't even contain the full game, as it's missing the final 3 worlds! The only way to get the complete version of the game is to find a rare 45-in-1 multicart.

King of Fighters '95: Without any doubt, this is the fastest fighting game in the world. In some instances, it's too fast! The roster is cropped and the graphics are abysmal.

Boogerman II: The Final Adventure. Includes the boogerhero protagonist who moves even slower than the in-game snail enemies.

Lethal Enforcers also received one, under a moniker of Lethal Weapon (not to be confused with the licensed NES game which was based on the movie series with the same name). On a side note, this game's engine has also become the base for Cobra Mission (which already can be confused with Mission Cobra, a NES rail shooter made by the forementioned Sachen), complete with Lethal Enforcers' reloading method and car chase scene.

Sachen is another example. Gaiapolis initially was a little-known arcade game by Konami (which never got an official home port), but it seems like Sachen was lucky enough to play the machine with this game while it was alive. Despite the speed and extremely wild amount of flicker, as well as traditional beepy Sachen music, however, it's still fairly playable (mainly in part due to the 99 continues you get at the start).

Super Contra X, developed by Chengdu Tai Jing Da Dong, some members of which founded the aforementioned Waixing, and published by Micro Genius, developers/publishers of Aladdin II and Thunder Warrior.

Aladdin II itself is also worth mentioning. Ostensibly a port of Aladdin on the Mega Drive, the game is a broken mess with a plethora of glitches, poor control, all of the cutscenes removed and horrible audiovisuals. It's so bad, it makes the NMS version look like a Polished Port in comparison.

Waixing and Nanjing deserve a separate page because 99.9% of their games are made on the same RPG engine. And don't forget how balanced the games are. Good luck beating them all. And notice that these are all in Chinese — there are barely any English translations, and if there are any, they're from fans.

M&M Heroes, the port of the first Heroes of Might and Magic is playable indeed, but only if you can get over with the scrappy graphics, not-so-humble interface and bleepy music. Otherwise, you'd rather play the Game Boy versions instead.

Biohazard a.k.a. Resident Evil was a third-person survival horror game, but became a top-down RPGish type game up until you got into random battles with zombies and other assorted horrors, wherein it switched gameplay to the combat model used in Resident Evil Gaiden. The music is of dubiuous quality, too.

Warriors Orochi. The port includes loads of barely beatable mazes, even bigger loads of enemy hordes and, of course, the non-existent balance, which turns the game into complete madness when you've gotta fight 20 enemies at once. Have fun.

Subverted with Nanjing's Pokémon Yellow, which remains accurate to the original game, more or less... While Mars's Pokémon Red and Gold fit this trope to a T.

Final Fantasy got mistreated by both companies, except while Waixing produced cheap title hacks of the first two games, Nanjing went further and reconverted parts IV, V, and VII. But, seeing that Final Fantasy VII got a fan translation to English, that says something.

Chrono Trigger. Drastically cut, compared to the original, and reportedly, the balance is so bad that it's literally impossible to beat the final boss (a character who, in the real game, happens to be a Disc One Final Boss) without using a cheating device.

King of Fighters R1 and R2. Knowing the universe and the games very well, you'd expect this to be direct-to-NeoGeo Pocket Color ports., but no. In reality, these are King of Fighters Kyo clones, except they take place during the events of '95 and '96. Even if these weren't dumped yet, the ad booklet, which was once available on the net, says it all.

One more game by SNK, Samurai Shodown RPG, also took a critical hit from Nanjing.

Nanjing's NES version of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is yet another case of "barely even a port": the storyline and even some graphics remain intact, but that's about the extent of it. Pity the poor child who expected Zelda's famous active battles and soundtrack, only to find random turn-based encounters and music from Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire in their place.

Master System/Sega Mark III, Game Gear

Dynamite Headdy on the Game Gear (and by extension the Master System backport for the Brazilian market, which is essentially the same thing) cut several levels and changed a few boss fights around in ways that can only be described as "never considered that someone might actually play this game" — Spinderella, in particular, is impossible to hit without taking a hit in return. The final boss too is artificially made more difficult — in the original Mega Drive/Genesis version, you get a hint as to which attack he will use, and then you get to pick a head to help deal with it. Here, for no reason at all, you are expected to pick a head before you know what attack you need it for.

Shadow Dancer on the Master System, unlike the original Shinobi (which was a Reformulated Game with similar stages but different play mechanics), attempted to be a straight port of the original arcade game, despite the fact that the arcade version ran on the more advanced System 18 hardware. The SMS version kept the one-hit-per-life system from the arcade version, which wouldn't be bad by itself if the game was balanced around this design. Instead, the SMS version kept the arcade's large character sprites while shrinking the actual playing field, allowing enemy projectiles to appear from out of nowhere and take the player by surprise, while at the same time making boss battles hard to maneuver around, leading to many cheap deaths. Moreover, only eight of the arcade version's 15 stages (counting the boss battles) were kept, and the ones that were kept were made much shorter. To top it off, the first-person shuriken-throwing bonus rounds are literally unbeatable due to a glitch that makes the final enemy ninja invulnerable.

Smash TV changes the blood to generic explosions, most of the characters have red skin, and the graphics are messy and unprofessional even for an 8-bit Sega console. The Game Gear version has choppy framerate and clunky controls, while the enemies move way too quickly in the Master System version. The enemies spawn a few spaces in front of a door instead of coming out of it, and in the Game Gear version, the first boss is almost impossible to beat due to the choppy way he moves around.

Sonic Spinball features levels which are remarkably similar compared to other Sonic the Hedgehog ports (not necessarily on its own merits), but whatever physics existed in the Genesis version were thrown completely out the window. Worse is the platforming engine, in which Sonic has an innate tendency to get himself stuck.

Another concern of the Master System to Game Gear ports was aspect ratio. When the screens were lined up, the width was focused on, rather than the height, resolved by making the player unable to see what would normally be the very top of the screen. This isn't normally a problem until the screen locks; an example is the Antlion boss of the Underground Zone in Sonic 2 where it gets very difficult to judge where the balls will bounce when you can't see when they peak.

Streets of Rage 2 has small sprites, off-key music, enemies that can combo you to death without giving you a chance to fight back, and an excessively high difficulty in comparison to the original. Just to highlight how sloppy this port is, the MS port of the first game features much bigger sprites (and more appealing graphics in general), is at a reasonable difficulty and is generally more competently programmed. As well as this, the music and the Cycle of Hurting were fixed in the Game Gear port of the second game.

Strider is yet another example of attempting to port a game to a platform that wasn't meant to handle it. The conversion was handled by Tiertex, the same team that developed the equally horrible PC ports of Strider and the infamous sequelStrider Returns.

Vigilante inexplicably changed the jump command from simply pushing the joystick up to pressing both attack buttons at the same time. The game also suffers from ridiculously precise hit detection; if the player punches or kick an enemy too closely, the attack won't register, giving the enemy a free hit. To make matters worse, the inputs for jump kicks (down+1+2 while jumping) and jumping punches (up while jumping) were made needlessly counter-intuitive as opposed to the simpler commands used from the arcade version.

Super NES (SNES)/Super Famicom (SFC)

Another World has better sound than the Sega Genesis version of the game, but it suffers very frequent slowdown, especially when there's a lot of laser fire on-screen. Despite this, there's still Loads and Loads of Loading, sometimes as long as twenty seconds between screens, a rarity on an SNES cartridge.

Brandish, Koei's SNES port of a Japanese PC-98 game, is legendary for having one of the worst control schemes in the history of gaming, one that renders the game almost unplayable for many players. The original used a mouse and keyboard control system similar to Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder that didn't translate that well to an SNES controller.

Mickey Mania: The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse was missing a stage present in all other versions of the game on the SNES, but more importantly, despite being a cartridge-based game, it somehow had loading times longer than the CD-based versions of the game for the Sega CD and PS (the Mega Drive original had no loading times at all). The controls and sound quality also suffered. Also, the missing stage from the SNES version is a rotating tower in the same vein as Nebulus/Castelian, which was released for systems roughly one generation older.

The SNES port of the original Mortal Kombat was most infamous for the heavily sanitized fatalities and gray blood, but its ugliness is more than skin-deep. Its controls were very unresponsive, and it was plagued with poor hit detection that made most combos impossible to perform and a bug where if both players threw projectiles, the first hit would make both projectiles disappear instead of having the players trade hits as in the arcade. Series creator Ed Boon actually apologized for the poor quality of the SNES port. The Genesis version, which was much more responsive and playable and much less censored, outsold the SNES version on a four-to-one basis.

Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow & the Flame, handled by Titus Software, featured bad controls, mistimed and glitchy play mechanics, a Game-Breaking Bug in the form of one specific mook that crashes the game when he dies, and screens that scroll only because the display tiles are too wide. Several story sequences were removed, and the game ends at Stage 13, with Jaffar appearing as an underwhelming Anticlimax Boss. It reeks of pure atrocity next to the amazing SNES version of the first game, handled by Arsys Software Inc.

The SNES port of Race Drivin managed to be even worse than the Mega Drive port, with an extremely low framerate, short draw distances, inexcusably slippery controls, and most of the screen being taken by the HUD.

Space Ace is a port in name only, being released on a cartridge with limited ROM space on a system that couldn't hope to reproduce the Full Motion Video of the arcade original. It's a rather awkward action game with stages based on scenes from the original. Dexter took only one hit before he died, the jumping is a disaster, Dexter's sprite is oversized, and he moves too slow.

Ultima VII had its plot butchered as a result of Nintendo's Never Say "Die" policies at the time. The double homicide that starts the plot of the game is replaced with a double kidnapping. It goes downhill from there. Also, the entire combat system and party system that defined the original game is dispensed with altogether in favor of a Zelda-style action RPG format in which the Avatar wanders around alone whacking snakes and bats with his sword. The Japan-only port of Worlds Of Ultima The Savage Empire for the Super Famicom has all of these issues.

Urban Strike has the same graphics and sounds as the Genesis original, but the action slows down immensely the moment anything other than than the player's own helicopter was on screen. In a confounding design decision, the button for jinking (strafing) was mapped to one of the face buttons, while the SNES versions of the previous two games had it conveniently mapped to the shoulder buttons which allowed it to not interfere with firing weapons. Of course the game does not have any options to reconfigure the controls.

TurboGrafx- 16 (TG16)/PC Engine (PCE)

Genocide makes the "bumper car" collision even worse (and many of the enemies love to ram you to death), the difficulty has spiked to unfair levels (especially the mid-to-late stages of the game) with cheap enemy placement, the controls are less responsive, the sound is mediocre, and the graphics are much worse than the original with the backgrounds and animations that are either extremely simplified or non-existent. The FM Towns port makes this version look like a joke by comparison.

Golden Axe is shamefully bad. Although the PC Engine was one of Telenet Japan's primary platforms and their Renovation division produced some good games for it, their port of Sega's arcade classic was saddled with horrible sound effects, poor controls and graphics actually worse than the 8-bit Sega Master System version. Its only novelty was the inclusion of voice acted cutscenes for each character which fleshed out the original game's story.

Genesis (GEN)/Mega Drive (MD), Sega CD/Mega CD, 32X

The Adventures of Willy Beamish received a Sega CD port that's prone to locking up, especially in the final areas, but just the loading in general kills the experience for all but the most patient.

ClayFighter was ported to the Genesis by Ringler Studios, which resulted in downgraded graphics and audio, as well as worse hit detection. Sadly, this was also the version that was uploaded to the Wii's Virtual Console.

Double Dragon II: The Revenge, released only in Japan by Pal Soft, is notable for being the only console port of the arcade game rather than a Reformulated Game like the NES version (the later PC Engine version was a remake of the NES version). Unfortunately it's not a very good one, with smaller character sprites and muddier colors, as well as numerous bugs (including a three-second pause every time a mook dies) and cheaper enemy and trap placement compared to the arcade game (especially notable with the weed trimming tractor in Mission 3, which moves in a ridiculously faster pace than in the arcade version). The game is virtually unplayable with the six-button controller as well, since it causes the player to move even more slowly than with the standard three-button controller. To top it off, this port actually came out a few months before Accolade's Genesis port of the first game in America, which was pretty decent by comparison. The only saving grace Double Dragon II has is that the arcade soundtrack made its way mostly intact.

Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone was an already mediocre arcade sequel, but the Genesis version suffers from missing animation frames (with many of the moves missing), bad hit detection (enemies don't react to the player's attacks until their health run out), different button inputs for the special moves (despite the fact that the Genesis controller had three action buttons matching the numbers of buttons in the arcade version), butchered renditions of the arcade game's music (one of the few redeeming aspects of the original) and poor character balance (especially in the final two stages, where a close-range attack from an enemy does more harm than projectiles such as arrows and fireballs). To make matters worse, they based the port on the U.S. version of the arcade game, which had the credit-feeding item shops, instead of the Japanese version, which featured selectable characters and all the special moves usable from the get-go.

Duke Nukem 3D was an unlicensed port (even though the company claims it's licensed) and was exclusive to Brazil. The game uses a Wolfenstein 3D-style 2D raycasting engine, which means that all the levels, instead of the city areas that were so abundant in the real game, are now glorified corridors. Duke's voice clips are almost undecipherable due to the high rate of compression used on them. Also, only Episode 2 was ported, so basically this port just had 3/4 of the original game taken out of it.

What's especially interesting about this port is that, for the Genesis, it's actually surprisingly very high-quality. It's only as bad as it is because the Genesis simply can't handle Duke 3D.

Hard Drivin. While the arcade game was a popular, well recieved driving simulator, the Sega Genesis port was nothing short of a trainwreck. While the real-time 3-D graphics are impressive for an early Genesis game (especially since it uses no add-on chips), it's clear that the Genesis was incapable of handling such a game on its own, judging by the single-digit framerate, laggy controls, lousy physics (just try to clear the loop de loop ramp) and slippery handling, all combined with a car with the durability ofa Pinto, and a very strict time limit with too few checkpoints, and the game is almost unplayable.

While TENGEN's Japan-only port of Marble Madness is regarded as a near arcade-perfect port of the original, EA's own port of the game for American markets is infamous for its ear-grating music.

Might & Magic 2 had decent graphics, especially compared to some older versions of the game. The control scheme took getting used to, but that wasn't too bad for a turn-based RPG. Unfortunately, someone messed up the computer AI, because enemies always had a predictable pattern — they would attack the party members in order, one after the other. Doesn't sound that bad? That includes party members out of melee (who are typically there for very good reason), turning the thing from mildly annoying to unbelievably frustrating. The British and German-exclusive SNES version fixes the computer AI.

Out Runners' Genesis conversion suffers from pretty much the same issues as the Genesis port of Turbo Out Run (see below), along with a forced split-screen view, even in the game's single-player mode.

Samurai Shodown, despite missing Earthquake, had a relatively fine Genesis port. Now one would expect the Sega CD port to be better, but aside from still not having Earthquake (on a CD, no less), there is a horrible Game-Breaking Bug in which the game crashes right before the final battle against Amakusa, making the game Unwinnable by Mistake. When word of this spread out, porting company JVC issued a recall where broken copies could be traded for the decent Sega CD port of Fatal Fury Special. No fixed Sega CD version of Samurai Shodown was ever released.

Star Control, programmed by Accolade and touted as the console's first 12-Megabit cartridge, managed to pack in some graphics and sound effects from later revisions of the game, but at a price: It absolutely slows the game to a crawl, even in the relatively simplistic full game map screen. Game Genie codebooks even published a code to turn off asteroids in combat to try making it a wee bit faster. The sad thing is, some of the original SC developers were responsible for the Genesis port. They regretted having botched it in many interviews to come, especially since the Genesis hardware is similar to the Amiga.

Starflight was a port of a PC game. The starmap is shrunken and simplified, the vast exploration of planetary maps (which didn't use much data on computers due to some processing tricks) have been replaced by a more arcadey minigame. The plot and alien interaction are also stripped down. While the Genesis port is actually larger than the PC version, incorporating a number of the improvements from Starflight 2, such as more meaningful ship upgrades and artifacts that actually do things, it did introduce an irritating bug that rendered a quest to disable the Uhlek impossible to complete.

Time Killers was a port of an already horrible arcade game that was released four years after the original. The end result wasn't pretty, with even more crippled controls and overall horrible presentation.

Todd's Adventures in Slime World is a port of the Atari Lynx game which has audio that can be accurately described as Sensory Abuse. It also lacks sprite scaling, a feature of the Lynx predating the Super NES's Mode 7 that the game was designed to show off at every opportunity, with nothing done to compensate. It overall manages to look worse than the original, an achievement for a port to a console allowing up to 64 colors on the screen from a handheld that could only manage 16.

Turbo Out Run: With Sims doing a respectable job at porting the original Out Run to the Genesis, it would seem natural for Sega to contract them again for the sequel. Unfortunately Sega handed the porting duties for Turbo Out Run to Tiertex instead, a company with a spotty track record of butchering home conversions of popular arcade games, which resulted in the Genesis version having worse graphics and sound quality, with many of the more elaborate background effects missing, as well as jerkier controls.

Wonder Boy III Monster Lair had hideous graphics, even worse music than the arcade version, and only 9 stages as opposed to the arcade's 14. By contrast, the TurboGrafx-CD version had near arcade-perfect graphics, retained all of the arcade game's stages, and added a rockin' Red Book audio soundtrack. Worse, all of the modern rereleases of the game are based on this version; don't fix these issues and with the exception of the Japan-only PS2 Sega Ages version, don't include the arcade version. The Virtual Console has both the Genesis and TurboGrafx-CD versions.

Philips CD-i

Dark Castle has even worse controls than the Genesis version, with one button being used to jump, duck or interact with objects; perhaps to compensate, it plays very sluggishly. It has better graphics than the Genesis version, but the screen is severely cropped. The list of high scores gets cluttered up quickly because you can save after dying, can continue from that save with no score penalty, and not have your previous high score erased... assuming you actually get anywhere, what with the godawful controls, swarms of enemies everywhere, and incredibly long hitstun whenever you trip over practically anything.

Tetris on the Philips CD-i is possibly unique of all these examples as its problem was that it had too good visuals as compared to the original. They decided to add nature scenes with the classic board sitting on some piece of the scenery, which ended up shrinking the playing field and making it a bit harder to see (and often annoyingly off-center).

Atari Jaguar

Space Ace got a release for the ill-fated Jaguar CD add-on. For some reason, the visual cues appear after the game expects you to perform the commands, killing you before you can even do anything. Considering Space Ace is a Full Motion Video game where the game consists solely of pressing buttons when ordered, the whole thing is completely unplayable.

Nintendo 64 (N64)

Cruis'n USA has muddier graphics compared to the 1994 arcade original, with a low draw distance, wonky framerate, and worst of all, the music picked a fight with a MIDI composer and lost. Yes, the arcade original used hardware that was totally different from what was used in the N64, but the fact that Midway had two full years to get it right makes the end result inexcusable. It also suffered from Nintendo's Censorship Bureau.

The port of Off-Road Challenge was even worse. The game suffered from jittery framerates (even the menus slowed down!), annoying music, a sparse selection of tracks, and a lame two player mode.

Daikatana, as if it wasn't lousy to start with on the PC, somehow got even worse after festering in development for another three months before finally being ported to the Nintendo 64... with significantly worse visuals, distance fog everywhere, and a blurry resolution that makes the game almost impossible to play in multiplayer split-screen. Oh, and the player can't even use the Daikatana.

Quake 64 cut down many graphical details (although the N64 could do quite a bit better), removed several stages completely (presumably due to limited cartridge space), and limited multiplayer to two players (when the N64 port of Quake II had four-player multiplayer). And the dark ambient soundtrack by Trent Reznor was replaced by generic atonal ambiance.

StarCraft features excessively clunky UI and unit handling as well as considerably worse graphics and audio. Just the thought of trying to play an RTS with the N64 controller should tell how terrible the port was. Somewhat justifiable, not all the game's content is available without the usage of the Expansion Pak (extra 4MB of memory). This port did however give us the extra mission Resurrection IV where Alexei Stukov is resurrected. Its story line is considered canon.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1-3 were ports that had unfortunately fell victim to the N64's shortcomings. The draw distance was lower. The trick controls had to be mapped to the C buttons because of the controller's design. Every single FMV had to be cut out, which means that the intro was replaced with ingame footage, and you got no reward for beating the game (whereas in the PS and Dreamcast versions, you get skater-specific video clips and bail compilations) due to the game having to be cut down to fit in a 16MB cartridge, which was 40 times smaller than the PS game. And also due to that filesize, there were only 6 songs in Pro Skater 1 and 2 (as opposed to 11 in the PS version of Pro Skater 1, 13 in the European release of Pro Skater 1, and 15 in Pro Skater 2) and they all had to be cut down to less than a minutenote To be fair, some of the songs in the PS version were also clipped short. Some of the songs in Pro Skater 1 were literally cut down to an instrumental. Most of them cut out after the first chorus, or sometimes even halfway through the 2nd verse. The songs looped frequently, which means that you had to turn the soundtrack off to actually enjoy the game. This is Tony Hawk we're talking about. The N64 port for the third game was the last game to ever come out for the N64. Talk about a bad way to end your console's lifespan.

The first Mega Man Legends game, renamed Mega Man 64, had several issues compared to the original PlayStation version; the draw distance was shorter in most areas, the voices were downsampled in order to fit on the smaller cartridge, and the CD Samples in the Apple Market CD store were taken out completely. The game suffers slowdowns whenever too many objects are onscreen at once, and there is also a glitch in which standing on moving objects can cause Mega Man Volnutt to slowly slide either to the left or right and fall off. Finally, the music that played over the credits was removed, and one of the generic town themes plays over it instead.

PlayStation (PS)

Creatures, in addition to compressed graphics, removed one of the most critical aspects of the series: the virtual genetics. Considering that these were the primary thing that set Creatures apart from other artificial life and pet sims, the lack of these was a definite sticking point for the fans. The lack of Game Mods for the console versions is also a problem.

Descent is a piece of absolute garbage. Though it features the awesome soundtrack from the Macintosh version, as well as remixes of the licensed songs (by Ogre of Skinny Puppy and Type O Negative) from Descent II, it is completely ruined by blocky graphics (enemies are hardly visible at distances), slideshow-level framerate (making firefights in large rooms nearly unplayable) and awkward controls (no analog support unless the player uses the rare Analog Joystick or the original Dual Analog pad, and even then it still kind of sucks). Inexcusable even by early PS standards.

The version of Final Fantasy V on this system was the first version with an official English localization. Unfortunately, it was saddled with a terrible Cut-and-Paste Translation that translates Sarisa (Faris' true identity) as Salsa, gives Faris a pirate accent that made most of her dialogue incomprehensible (four of the game's Multiple Endings combine these two issues), and has a Translation Trainwreck of enemy names that can be hilariously awful (Sucker is translated as Soccer, Exdeath is translated as X-Death, Wyvern is translated as Y Burn, Tonberry is translated as Dingleberry), in addition to a corrupted save system that made Soft Resets unusable, butchered MIDI arrangements of Nobuo Uematsu's classic soundtrack, and incompatibility with anything newer than the first PlayStation, note This is an extremely rare case of a PS1 game being incompatible with newer systems, and given the reliability of the backwards compatibility on the PS2 and PS3; this is really saying something which had many fans sticking with the fan-translated ROM dump of the Super Famicom version or the later GBA port. Also, the PAL version is in English only, in a genre where translations to French and German are needed.

Final Fantasy VI has many new features such as FMV sequences, bestiaries, and such, but their novelty is cancelled out by the ridiculously long loading times, a problem shared with the later PS port of Chrono Trigger. The Greatest Hits and PAL versions (the first time the game appeared in Europe) also have a part that can be Unwinnable if you head back to Narshe and swap Celes and Locke, who are required for the Opera scene, something that did not happen in the SNES version. As with Final Fantasy V, the PAL version is in English only (but that's a minor issue here, with Woolsey's script).

Hexen looks like it was made on a slightly modified engine of Doom's SNES port, complete with enemies animated only on the face side, the poor framerate and a pretty low screen resolution (hence that, poor visibility); but what was slightly excuseable for a 16-bit console, doesn't do the job for 32 bits, however. The levels were also cut in this way or another, which lead to turning some of the ladders into elevators, torches obviously hanging in air, green serpents being completely replaced either with the centaurs or brown serpents. And on top of all that, the savegame has occupied the entire memory card, leading to a whole minute of saving or loading the game. On the plus side, it had a lot of different control layouts, as well as Redbook-quality music and the exclusive CG movies, but that's it.

Hidden And Dangerous removes the squad-based elements entirely (the player's teammates became, in effect, extra lives), has massively cruder graphics, is first-person only and is generally dumbed down

The sequel to Krush Kill n' Destroy was lucky enough to get a port of its own, which, despite the removal of most of the units' voice samples, didn't had a whole ton of obvious bugs... Moreover, it had a split-screen versus mode which is rarely met among RTS games, and that would imply that Krossfire would be great for a quick and friendly skirmish, if only it wasn't for the controls. In a nutshell, the port ditches the traditional C&C-like interface of the original version... only to replace it with a menu-based squad selection system, which takes a while to use and an even longer while to figure out how it works. Moreover, the feature list makes it clear that the developers were intentionally messing up with your well-established reflexes:

The control method has been custom-designed for the PlayStation, allowing you to order your units to the front line, ready for action or to their deaths.

Puzznic is a port of an arcade game that for some reason doesn't have the music from the original. That is, if you're playing the US version; the Japanese and European releases have music. The kicker: The music works on PS1 emulators.

Rayman 2, while not as bad as other examples of this trope, has lower-quality visuals, is missing entire levels (noticeable in the fact that you only have 800 lums to collect instead of the usual 1000), and overall is a lot more watered-down than the original N64 version. What makes it this trope is that the original game was on a cartridge, which is generally much more limited than a CD-ROM.note It does have voice-acting, but it's generally so underwhelming that most people preferred the original's simlish. As if to apologize, the PS2 would get Rayman Revolution, which is by and large the opposite of this trope.

Shadow Man was abysmal on PS, in part because the system was far too underpowered to handle such a massive game. Originally made for PC, the game saw minor cuts to content for the N64 and Dreamcast ports, but were still generally intact, had most of the original content (amazingly, the N64 cartridge was able to hold nearly all the maps with only a few minor rooms cut, plus nearly all the audio and cutscenes intact), and were playable. PS port, however... the textures were very low resolution and grainy, controls were awful, and not only are the load times quite long, but the noises the system makes while accessing the data sounds as if your system is about to tear itself apart. While most versions of this game got good critical praise, the PS version was panned.

South Park, a port of the N64 game by Iguana, was an unfinished bug-ridden disaster with inconsistent framerate, bad draw distance, poor audio quality, and even using footage of the N64 version as FMV. The multiplayer maps aren't named like they are on the PC and N64 versions, instead they are all just named "DM(Number)" which makes the game feel like an Obvious Beta. The game even cuts out content from the N64 version which was on a cartridge.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4 are effectively downgraded ports of the PS2 versions made only for a quick cash-in among the ones who haven't bought a more powerful console yet. It should be said that 3 manages to be a good game by running smoothly and having unique features to it, but 4 is a total disaster. Instead of being made by Shaba Games like THPS3's port was, 4's port was headed by Vicarious Visions. They were known for amazing ports of Tony Hawk to the GBA, so who knows what happened here. The levels barely resembled their 6th-gen counterparts, the physics were wonky, the level, design was terrible, the graphics looked unfinished, it was nigh impossible to do a lip trick, the songs were censored to the point of absurdity, and it was filled with glitches.

X-Men vs. Street Fighter had a PS version released in the US as Sega had stopped supporting the Saturn in America by then, despite the fact that the PS didn't have a cartridge slot that allowed for additional RAM like the Saturn. As a result, the PS version has choppy animation due to many frames removed, eternal loading times and most importantly of all, lacks the tag-team mechanics of the arcade original; instead, the player's second character acts as a glorified assist character (unless the computer or second player is using the same pair of characters as the first player). The PS versions of Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter and Marvel Vs Capcom Clash Of The Super Heroes were significantly improved, thought the latter lacked the tag-team feature.

The two Humongous Entertainment game ports by Runecraft weren't trainwrecks by any means, but they were still badly screwed up. Their port of Pajama Sam 3 suffered from Loads and Loads of Loading, an awkwardly upped frame rate (it's like everyone is on steroids), much of the music removed for no reason at all, and bad controls in a game where all you do is point and click. Their port of Backyard Soccer (which was actually based on the MLS Edition, without the pros, even though it has the same intro) wasn't much better, which had awkward controls and an incredibly simplistic physics engine rather than the more realistic one found on the PC version. Just for the record, the Game Boy Advance versions were closer to their PC counterparts in terms of physics than this.

San Francisco Rush received a terrible PS1 port. The game contained only four tracks (compared with the N64 version's six), the graphics were sloppily drawn, the soundtrack was even worse than the original's, and the stunts were horribly downgraded. The game did, however, contain one thing the Arcade and N64 versions lacked: Weather conditions.

Sega Saturn (SAT)

Akumajo Dracula X: Gekka no Yasokyokunote "Devil Castle Dracula X: Nocturne in the Moonlight", a Saturn port of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night which never left Japan, attempted to add some additional features by making Maria playable and adding two new areas. Unfortunately the novelty of the new features are quickly canceled out by the actual quality of the port itself: the added areas do not match the overall graphical level of the original PS version at all, the game suffers from constant slowdown when the screen is filled with enemies, most of the graphical transparency effects are lost or replaced with dithering, and the game loads before and after entering the transition rooms between areas (you know, those rooms that were there to lessen the loading times in the first place). It also loads when entering or exiting the main menu and due to the fact that the Saturn controller doesn't have as many buttons as the PS1 one, there's no dedicated button to open the map: as a result, you need to enter the main menu every time you want to check the map, meaning a process that took a second on a PS1 now takes around 30 seconds.

Maria's inclusion (though not directly related to the port itself but worth mentioning) had its own issues, as her fighting style from Rondo of Blood was not carried over (wherein she attacked with weapons like doves or kittens). Instead she relied on martial arts attacks to get through the game, which made her bland compared to her Rondo counterpart. This was rectified in the PSP port, though lacking the two exclusive zones from the Saturn version.

Not everyone was happy with the reversal of her play style, however. Some preferred her new moves much more than her old ones. Also, other stuff the PSP version left out from the Saturn version were some new tracks. One of which being her boss theme, which was replaced with Richter's for some reason.

Daytona USA had most of the sounds and all of the play mechanics that made the original arcade version so beloved. The graphics, though, were another story. It should be noted that the back cover blurb for the European release has the balls to call it a "pixel-perfect conversion". Later Sega did release Daytona USA: Championship Circuit Edition, which is basically "Daytona on the Saturn done right".

Phantasmagoria was ported to the Saturn in Japan under the shortened title Phantasm with Japanese voice acting. While the translation and dubbing remain faithful to the original PC version, the graphics and FMV sequences were downgraded to the console lack of video decompression, making it harder to see what you're doing. The game was also heavily censored, limiting Carno's wives' death scenes to a few shots of Carno and Adrienne's reactions. There's also the fact that the game was released on eight discs, which is one more than the original PC release.

Virtua Fighter had the exact same problems as Daytona USA. Right down to getting a free update six months later titled "Virtua Fighter Remix."

Worms: World Party was a decent port from the PC version, except for the atrocious network code. The most notable of the many Game Breaking Bugs was the lobby system bug — if anyone disconnected from a lobby at any time (including leaving to another lobby before a match starts, disconnecting during a match, or skipping the post-match wrap up stats) everyone in that lobby would have to power down (not reset) their Dreamcast, or else everyone's game would be stuck forever on the lobby screen the next time it showed up.

The Dreamcast version of Mortal Kombat 4, Mortal Kombat Gold, gets some extra characters but at the expense of being more buggy than any other version of the game.

The Dreamcast port of Slave Zero was an unfinished mess shoveled out to cash in the successful launch of the system. The entire soundtrack beside the intro and ending credits themes was excised. The framerate was low and unstable, and severely dipped during the cutscenes, making them nearly incomprehensible. Many enemies and non-hostile NPCs were removed from the levels, with one enemy type (the giant green mecha-spiders in the sewer levels) being removed entirely. The main menu was glitched when the console was set to languages other than English, and the port introduced many ridiculous bugs such as falling infinitely from a bottomless pit or getting killed by a cutscene in the first level and becoming invincible as a result.

PlayStation 2 (PS2)

Arcana Heart 2 suffers extreme lags in sound, game speed and graphics (on the note of that last one, the sprites are also horribly pixelated). Though some can still enjoy if they adapt to it, most of the audience (Japanese) have been playing it in arcades, so disappointments occur. The weird thing is, it works better in a PS2 emulator if the computer spec is good enough.

Arctic Thunder, a port of an arcade snowmobile racer, suffers from screen pixelation and a really bad framerate. Since the graphics do not nearly touch the potential of the PS2 (even for a game made in 2001), it's clear that Inland Productions was pretty lazy in porting this game over. It also supports only two players, compared to four from the Xbox version (which, by the way, is a Polished Port).

Grandia II has incredible slowdown on the PS2 compared to the Dreamcast original; the Dreamcast had massive amounts of Video RAM, which Grandia II was designed to take full advantage of. Also included were a rather distinct drop in resolution, the occasional unannounced complete game lock-up, and a lot of the characters' announcements of their moves are either muted or, worse yet, not actually synced with their moves. There was also how characters in combat would sometimes turn completely white for the duration of the battle, and AI glitches that could result in some battles never ending.

Guitar Hero III couldn't cope with some of the busier songs and suffers from clear lagging and skipping issues — a game breaker for a Rhythm Game. (See "Knights of Cydonia" and "One" for examples.) It's pretty clear that the game was primarily developed to target PS3 and Xbox 360, and every other platform was hacked up from that (the PC version is, save for some controller modifications, a direct port of the 360 version). Oddly enough, the PS2 port was rated higher on Metacritic than the 360 version.

World Tour had very downgraded graphics and Loads and Loads of Loading. When creating a character, it can take up to 10 seconds for each piece of hair and clothing to load.

Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero on PS2 are literally just the game's content bolted onto the World Tour engine. As a result, they suffer from the same problems as World Tour, if not more, and they do not have any of the major improvements the PS3/360/Wii counterparts received, such as the upgraded engine, multiplayer improvements, Career challenges, and so-on.

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life was a GameCube title originally, so it makes sense for the weaker PS2 to not play it correctly, but it's still considerably duller looking and almost unbearably laggy and slow, so the added features (one new bachelorette, as well as the option to have a daughter, and gameplay upgrades introduced in Distaff Counterpart) generally do not make up for it.

killer7, originally designed for the GCN, received a PS2 port that was generally derided for its slightly inferior graphics, less responsive controls, occasional framerate problems, and most of all, significantly longer load times.

Max Payne 1 and 2 on PS2 are inferior in every way to the Xbox and PC versions. Max Payne 1 in particular suffered from lousy controls, long loading times, poor framerate and no ability to save whenever you want unlike the other versions. Max Payne 2 was not much better, though this time you could save at any time you wanted, there was no autosave feature meaning if you got really far without saving the game via the pause menu, you would lose lots of progress and have to start again. It also suffered from lots of blurry, pixelated textures, still lousy controls, really long loading times (sometimes even during the levels), parts of levels being cut out and missing sound effects. While there was still fun to be had with the games on the PS2, they were only good for players who didn't own an Xbox or a capable PC.

Mega Man Anniversary Collection suffers from input lag, a game breaking flaw for a game that requires such quick reflexes.

Mushihime Sama doesn't properly emulate the slowdown of the arcade original, causing the PS2 port to be more difficult than intended and moments where the game suddenly slows down or speeds back up. In addition, it doesn't run at its native resolution — playing the game in vertical mode reveals that the game's resolution has been scaled down.

Psychonauts apparently had its controls dipped in molasses during the porting process, and it also suffers from framerate issues, long loading times, and occasional crashes. And woe betide you if you live in Europe and got the PAL version. Sound effects playing a random length of time after the trigger, the music loops go out of sync, the cutscene camera being in the wrong place, event triggers occurring out of order, Raz randomly getting stuck on thin air...

Rainbow Six 3 was a port of the Xbox version which took a major hit, given the hardware limitations. The levels were, according to IGN, "cropped like a butch haircut, stripped like a captive terrorist, and given a facelift like Michael Jackson".

Rock Band played correctly, but most of the cool features were cut out. To work around the console's graphical limitations, each song used a Full Motion Video with a preset band, with the gameplay UI overlaid on top. This, however, meant that character customization had to go. The Band World Tour mode was also stripped down into a more Guitar Hero-like career setup, and for obvious reasons there was no Downloadable Content.

Shadow the Hedgehog suffers from the same problems as Sonic Heroes below, which was also a multiplatform release. The PS2 version of the game also had very low draw distance and slippery controls to boot, and couldn't keep up with Shadow's "Chaos Control" move.

Sonic Heroes has a much lower framerate in the PS2 version than the Xbox, GCN, and PC versions, only running at 30 FPS (as opposed to 60 FPS on the others) despite having lower resolution textures and character models in comparison to the other two versions. It also suffered longer loading times than Sonic 06. It's no wonder GameSpot and IGN gave the PS2 version the lowest score out of all three releases.

Rumor has it Executive Meddling played a role here as Sony apparently told Sega that unless this game was released on the PlayStation 2, they would forfeit the right to publish anything else on the platform. So Sega had to take an in-house engine they were working with and discard it in favor of Criterion Games's RenderWare multi-platform game architecture, with the redevelopment required harming the stability of the end product.

Vantage Master Japan had a major bug in its PS2 version. Every time the player moves the cursor, the screen pixelates heavily◊. It also doesn't possess any of the extra content that was released for the PC version.

Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: The Beginning of Destiny, a PS2 port of the first Tag Force game for the PSP, grossly suffers from music that skips around like a broken record, the game lags and locks up when certain cards are played, and worst of all, the one key feature in it that would've been a boon to the game — multiplayer — is taken out. Even the purported extras you can get by linking it up with the second Tag Force game were horribly lacking.

Xbox

Half-Life 2 had some effort put into it on Valve's part, but it's clear that the Xbox simply did not have the horsepower to make the Source engine shine. Fuzzy textures and some very noticeable framerate problems plague this port.

Myst IV: Revelation had an Xbox version with Loads and Loads of Loading. Unfortunately, the loading lag comes into effect every single time the player moves to another spot. In a game focused on exploration and puzzle solving, this made it nearly unplayable for all but the most patient players.

Metal Slug 3 is a difficult arcade game that expects you to burn up many, many continues to get through each stage. The western Xbox port, however, gives you a limited set of continues which puts you back at the beginning of the current stage. The problem? The fifth and final stage is a Marathon Level that practically takes up half of the game, with several bosses spread throughout. Have fun going through all that with basically no continues at all.

Nintendo GameCube (GCN)

Mega Man Anniversary Collection, while not a terrible port, takes some getting used to, since the "shoot" and "jump" buttons were switched from the NES originals and there's no way to reassign the button configurations. The Control Stick can't register diagonal movements or only does so when it's exactly on those diagonals. Infuriating when you're trying to leap out and grab a ladder above a spike pit... and it made the shoot-em-up segment of Wily's fortress in MM8 seem impossible until one discovers that the D-Pad works much better at the cost of being slightly awkward to reach, inverted if you use the Hori Game Boy Player controller and if you are willing to spend a bit of money on it if you don't have one. Also, the arranged soundtrack from the Rockman Complete Works games is entirely absent.

The version of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask included on The Legend of Zelda Collector's Editionnote Which was given away to people who had registered a GameCube and two games and later sold with the system itself suffers from several glitches not present in the original N64 version, including music skipping, a myriad of graphical issues, and a few Game-Breaking Bugs that can crash the game, making freezes disturbingly usual. In a game with such strict Save-Game Limits, this can be a huge problem.

Wii

Far Cry Vengeance is a remake of FarCry Instincts: Evolution. It's understandable a Wii port of an Xbox 360 game wouldn't look as good as the original, although there are ways to lessen the drop in quality. It's not so understandable for the game to look barely better than Jurassic Park: Trespasser, when the original FarCry games were known for Scenery Porn out the wazoo. Or how about the excellent AI of the originals, which becomes so idiotic that it doesn't notice when someone five feet away gets killed? Or the random content cuts? This wouldn't pass muster on the N64; on the Wii, it feels like a slap in the face.

Sam & Max: Season One has Loads and Loads of Loading and a critical Game-Breaking Bug — if your cursor hits the lower-right edge of the screen, it sticks. The textures have been hideously compressed to fit within the space limitations of WiiWare, to the extent that a lot of text is indecipherable, ruining quite a few background gags. What really puts this into Porting Disaster territory is that the game had a tendency to freeze. Fortunately the game has autosave.

In the Season Two port, the entire video during the episode five credits is absent with still pictures from said video in its place. The cutscenes are also somewhat choppy like in Season One, but at least there isn't any dialogue that does weird jumps or cuts in Season Two, unlike its Season One predecessor.

Sega Superstars Tennis suffers from god-awful motion controls (yes, you can choose from either the Wii remote on its own, the Wii Remote held on its side, or Wii Remote + Nunchuk, but no matter what, all of these control schemes play like garbage). With controls like that, even Tails can be a challenge to beat!

The Sims 3 had passable ports to other consoles, but the Wii port was just plain awful as the free-roaming feature was poorly done and buggy, which did not help with its much weaker graphics.

The Force Unleashed had more restricted environments due to weaker processing power and ugly character models.

Harvest Moon: Magical Melody completely removed the option to play as a female character, with the porter claiming the Wii disc somehow couldn't handle all the extra content—despite the original being on GameCube (a system that uses 1.4GB mini-DVD discs compared to the full-sized 4.7GB DVD5 discs the Wii could accept). To make matters worse, this was the only version some countries got, and it also lacked the rival events. Worse, if the PAL version of the game is played with the language set to Italian, the game freezes when the player tries to talk with the blacksmith.

Samba de Amigo used the Wii Remote and Nunchuk instead of the Maracas controllers used by the original NAOMI-based arcade cabinet and its Dreamcast port, resulting in some imprecise movement.

Cruis'n was not so much a new console installment to the 90s arcade racing series, than it was a Dolled-Up Installment of a console port of the The Fast and the Furious arcade game Midway had lying around at the time—only with all references to the film edited out due to Midway losing the film license when the port was being made. Which wouldn't had been too bad if the game didn't suffer from long loading times (with wait times between races being as long as an entire minute), a terrible framerate (with the game noticeably chugging when cars encountered any sort of collision, or outright freezing when the player changed a music track), overly-sensitive controls, barely existent sound effects, and a pocketful of glitches. Most damningly, Cruis'n was overall a pretty egregious case of being a quick-and-dirty port job tossed out to cash in on the then-new console: despite being a a 2007 port of an arcade game made in 2004, the game looks exactly like the original arcade release, which graphically makes Cruis'n a game that has arrived one or even two generations too late (indeed, most reviewers cited Cruis'n as looking no better than a game released on the Nintendo 64). It stands as one of the worst-reviewed games released on the console; and if Midway had any plans to make more Cruis'n console games in the future, the game's poor sales certainly put the brakes on them.

Rock Band on Wii was delayed by nearly seven months after its original launch on PS3 and Xbox 360, and it was literally just a port of the PS2 version with five additional songs (thus, no character customization, downgraded career, no online play or DLC).' Rock Band 2 on Wii addressed these limitations and was more in line with the other current-generation consoles.

Xbox 360 (360)

The 360 port of Blood Bowl's original PC version covered everything except for one small omission—online leagues. Removing the online multiplayer leagues from Blood Bowl is about on equivalent to removing multiplayer from a fighting game, basically gutting the main drawcard of the entire game. The result was best summarized in Angry Joe's review of the game where he was mostly complimentary towards the game in general for most of the review until he got around to mentioning the omission of multiplayer leagues, where his attitude suddenly turned violently nasty. He ended up giving the 360 version a score of 2/10 almost solely for this reason—yeah, it was that big of an omission.

Bully: Scholarship Edition is an odd duck. Some players reported playing through the entire game with no problems, while others complained of crashes, glitches, unresponsive controls, and errands that refuse to appear. Rockstar released a patch which fixed the problems for some affected players... and reportedly made things worse for others. There does not seem to be any rhyme or reason to who is and is not affected by these problems.

Dark Messiah was not too bad on PC. The 360 release is... something else entirely. The graphics are terrible, and despite trying to be an RPG, the game flagrantly removes pretty much every game mechanic associated with the RPG genre to make a linear first-person game. It was an attempt to completely remake the game as something more console-friendly, as Ubisoft had previously done with Far Cry... but while Far Cry Instincts was lauded for its unique direction and all-around quality, Dark Messiah of Might & Magic: Elements didn't turn out quite as well.

DoDonPachi: DaiOuJou BLACK Label, in addition to the long load times (even when installed to the hard drive), is also rather buggy. One particularly egregious error is when the screen is in Tate mode, all the menus will still be displayed as if it was still in Yoko mode so you have to either tilt your monitor or your head to navigate the menus. The likely reason for all these things? Aqua Systems used the source code from the PS2 version. A patch that corrected the loading times was finally released... two years later... and by then, it was out of print. So much for waiting for a patch before buying it.

Duke Nukem Forever has inconsistent framerate, constant screen-tearing, poorly implemented shadows, excruciatingly long loading times... In part it's because the porting was rushed, but given the game's dated visuals and the fact the PS3 version has no such issues (which also makes it more enjoyable), it's not an excuse. Nevertheless, this Porting Disaster did not prevent clueless fans from claiming that the game was originally developed for Xbox 360 and then ported to PC, despite the PC version being the best of the lot and the Xbox 360 version being the worst, not to mention the fact that the entire Xbox platform as a whole did not exist when the game started developmentnote Duke Nukem Forever was announced in 1997, the first Xbox came out in 2001. However, the DLC The Doctor Who Cloned Me included a patch that has fixed all these issues. Now the blood decals don't flicker, the textures load fully, the framerate drops are extremely rare, etc. Now the game is much more enjoyable, especially since the DLC more or less won back the crowd for the people who played it.

Guwange runs in letterboxed 16:9 on the Xbox Live Arcade if you are using any resolution that doesn't have a 16:9 aspect ratio (e.g. a standard-ratio CRT screen), on top of the pillarboxing used to fit a vertical screen onto a horizontally oriented monitor. Unless you have a huge widescreen TV or are willing to turn your screen 90 degrees, prepare to play in a very small screen.

R-Type Dimensions lacks customizable controls on the 360; A is to shoot, B is to shoot rapid-fire shots, and X is to fire your Force Pod. Which is counterintuitive if you're playing on any controller with a tilted ABXY diamond or an ABXY setup that isn't diamond-shaped at all.

Space Invaders Extreme had its XBLA release featuring neither a stage mode nor a "no continues" mode (rankings are instead done through Arcade Mode and accept scores achieved with continues). As well, the game stretches to fill the entire screen, which means if you're playing on anything other than a 16:9 screen the game will look stretched.

Lego Jurassic World shipped with an unparalleled Game-Breaking Bug that made the game crash upon start-up, and it still hasn't been patched. All other versions don't have this glitch.

Supreme Commander suffers from stuttering graphics, framerates as low as 1 FPS when a nuke goes off, and lockups whenever you receive a transmission. Chris Taylor admitted the crappiness of the port and promised that Supreme Commander 2 will be better. At the time of release, only the most powerful PCs could handle it at full detail on the largest maps, and even two years later most players couldn't get good performance on top settings. A console not being able to handle it was basically a foregone conclusion. The sequel has slightly simpler models and textures to make it more accessible.

For the tenth anniversary of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Rockstar removed the Xbox port from the Xbox 360 store and released a "HD remaster"... that was actually a port of the mobile version. Even ignoring the graphical and framerate issues that come from this kind of port, the audio randomly cuts out during cutscenes and starting missions will occasionally hardlock the system.

PlayStation 3 (PS3)

Bayonetta was originally developed by PlatinumGames for the Xbox 360, with Nextech doing the PS3 port. Despite the noticeable decrease in graphic quality, the game is so unbelievably slow it causes truly atrocious framerate drops and you'll suffer from Loads and Loads of Loading even when pressing the pause button (thankfully, the loading times were fixed by a patch from Sony, which allows players to install the game to the internal hard drive).

Hideki Kamiya later clarified why the port was so shoddy was development for the game was primarily on 360 hardware.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has had some serious lag issues on the PS3. About halfway through the game, many players have hit lag that slows the game down so much, it becomes unplayable. Especially bad because "halfway through" for this game could mean over fifty hours of playtime. Bethesda denied the problem entirely at first, then told players how to reduce the lag, but not eliminate it. There have since been several patches attempting to fix the problem.

The PS3 version of Fallout: New Vegas also becomes plagued with increasingly worse slowdown and more frequent freezing as the game "grows", as in, as the player progresses. Adding DLC data also aggravates the problems, and the Ultimate Edition, which includes all the DLC items and missions, is well known to be even more unstable than the already shaky vanilla version.

F.E.A.R. was one of the first PS3 porting disasters, released early in the console's lifetime. The port had been hyped for a solid year before being released six months after the Xbox 360 version. What did PS3 users get? Long load times, an inconsistent framerate, no pack-in expansion content, and reduced graphical fidelity compared to the PC and 360 versions. The latter was a cardinal sin for a console that came onto the market boasting about its technical hardware prowess and support for full 1080p HD resolutions at a time when 1080p was not widely prevalent. The magazines of the time warned readers to skip this port and keep playing the PC and 360 versions instead.

Mafia II got hit with this on the PS3 to the extent that developer Take Two Interactive actually apologized for making the PS3 version the least feature rich version, compared to the PC (which is the fullest experience) and Xbox 360 versions.

No More Heroes: Heroes' Paradise has almost hilariously bad motion controls compared to the Wii version, which makes the game harder than it was originally when it comes to recharging your beam katana, as it takes much longer and in boss fights can get you killed. Seeing as how the PlayStation Move normally has much more responsive motion controls compared to the Wii. Thankfully, the PS3 port does give you the option to play with a standard controller.

TheOrangeBox had a vastly inferior PS3 version. Valve did not develop it (for certain reasons, which are no longer true as of Portal 2); it was done by an Electronic Arts internal studio. This was probably most noticeable in Team Fortress 2. The game was a playground for griefing as bugs that had been fixed for nearly a year in the PC/360 versions went unpatched. Every other game had an Engineer who knew the sky/underground sentry glitch.

Persona 3 FES suffers from several emulation problems on PSN, such as the game failing to save or just deleting your saved games when you try to load, freezing, and lots of texture flickering. This has been fixed in a firmware update.

Psychonauts plays much better than its PS2 counterpart, but a severe Game-Breaking Bug in the "Meat Circus" level can shut the console off with no warning.

The ports of the first three Ratchet & Clank games all have some bad problems. For all of them, the music doesn't loop properly (instead playing the first few seconds of the loop and then restarting), the tour on planet Todano in Going Commando has had the audio cut for some reason, and sometimes you can see through skyboxes and see the stars of the spacebox.

Splinter Cell Trilogy is a compilation of the first three games that omits fundamental features like the option to invert look controls - which had been in almost every prior release of the same games. After initially claiming that inverted controls were not an industry standard - and following a lengthy outcry from frustrated customers — Ubisoft patched it. Several months later.

Turning Point: Fall of Liberty wasn't very good on any console, but the bomb-wiring mini-game in the PS3 version tells you to work by the colors of the buttons...or, rather, the colors of the corresponding Xbox buttons.

The HD version of Sly 2: Band of Thieves is prone to random freezing, and sometimes, all sounds will go missing, and quitting the game when this happens will freeze your PS3 also. Despite all these problems, Sony has not bothered to patch it at all.

The HD version of the original Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus is missing some music from the original version. For example, in the PS2 version's prologue, a saxophone and accordion would join the background music once you made it inside the police headquarters. The HD version, for some inexplicable reason, removes this dynamic element from its soundtrack — instead, playing the same music loop through the whole mission. Also, the music often gets infinitesimally out of sync. Very hard to pick up on and easy to ignore except for the Mz. Ruby boss fight. The notes can play a millisecond before or after when you need to press it, and how badly they are out of sync can change from section-to-section, so there's no adapting. Easiest way to win is to mute the YV and go by visuals.

The HD version of Jak II: Renegade is also missing some music cues from the original version.

The PS3 port of Zen Studios' Pinball FX 2 seems to suffer from the same random input lag and slowdown issues that plague Capcom's PS3 ports. Also, it has the same problem of only running at up to 720p — The original Xbox 360 versions supports 1080p. Sure, they added 3D TV support and ability to purchase extra tables that isn't available in the Xbox 360 original (but also available for the Windows 8 port), but any lag in games that requires hair-trigger response like pinball sims is inexcusable. Also, the title screen was a boring static screen compared to the original.

Fatal Frame 2 suffered missing graphics in the PSN port. It got so bad that they had to temporarily take it off the PSN store. Fortunately, it has been fixed and plays like normal now.

The Sega Vintage Collection releases of Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 were particularly nasty in that not only they had a serious controller lag problem and forces the game to run at 720p even on 1080p-capable displays, but the game doesn't even display the real title screen, instead sticking you in its own interface where a video of the title screen plays in a small window on the bottom left side of the screen. Because of this, you can't enter the Cheat Code to get into the level select screens of either titles.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is borderline unplayable due to graphics and sound issues: Glitches will sometimes leave enemies floating in midair, and the sound sometimes cuts out during boss fights or larger hordes of enemies. The beautiful world from the PS4 and Xbox One releases didn't survive either: The game runs in native 540x960 resolution with a short draw distance, texture maps popping in and out of the frame, and a framerate that routinely drops into the twenties or teens. The Nemesis system also took a beating: The number of unique characteristics & appearances an Uruk can have has been severely reduced, making the entire game feel much more repetitive and simplistic than the PS4 or Xbox One versions. Here's Eurogamer's take on it. Thankfully, two patches fixed most of the problems, but that still doesn't give the developers an excuse to release it in the condition it was initially in, and even with the game fixed, it still occasionally slows down and has the sound clip.

In 2015, Rockstar removed the original PlayStation 2 version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas from the Playstation store and released a "HD remaster"... that was exactly the same as the Xbox 360 version, which is actually a port of the mobile version. All of the above-mentioned problems in the Xbox 360 version apply to this version aswell.

The Prince of Persia HD Collection. Background music randomly stops and doesn't loop properly, especially in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and the game is prone to randomly crashing if the PS3 running it is connected to the Internet (even background tasks or trophies can trigger this). This is a rare case of a game running worse on more powerful hardware.

The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie-The Game had its Playstation 2 version ported to PS2 Digital Classics after the Playstation 3 was released, but the game was bogged down by lag. The cutscenes would eventually have the audio de-sync from the video sometimes by over a second. The lag went into actual gameplay as well with input lag of a much as one second being present. The game also had the resolution stuck at "stretch" which would need to be reset by the player every time. The game was pulled by its developers from the service very fast.

The PS3 port of Dragon Age: Inquisition is infamous due to the console not being able to keep up with the game physics and scope, long load times and frequent console freezes on large areas like the hinderlands and Skyhold. Not helping is the fact that later DLC and patches caused more instability and bugs to the game with the Black Emporium DLC bugging out the sound effects, music and an infinite load screen that leads to a console restart if the game is exited from the console menu.

Wii U

For a while, the Wii U port of Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed had quite a few Game Breaking Bugs: Boost pads on Boost Challenges wouldn't load, one mission loaded a boat on land, among many other glitches. While the other versions do have quite a bit of bugs, none of them are as bad as what the Wii U version originally had. Thankfully, SUMO Digital released a patch that fixed these.

The Wii U version of Rodea: The Sky Soldier is a particularly weird example. The game was originally envisaged and developed as a Wii game, completed, and left to simmer while the Wii U came out. In the meantime, a 3DS version of the game was created, obviously changing up some gameplay and downgrading the graphics to fit the hardware. Come 2015, and the game is released on Wii U and 3DS—and the Wii U version is simply an HD port of the 3DS game, not the superior Wii version. Yes, that means the Wii U version of the game is objectively worse than the Wii version. You know it's bad when Yuji Naka himself tweets "Please play the Wii version." Even stranger is the way the game was distributed—players could only get their hands on the coveted Wii version as a bonus with the first batch of copies produced. After that, the Wii version ceased to circulate.

Mighty No. 9's Wii U port suffered from frequent crashes, extremely long load times, and the worst of the frame-rate issues on the main consoles. A patch was quickly released at launch to mitigate most of the crashes and somewhat shorten the long (albeit frequent) loading times, but the frame-rate issues remains unaddressed.

Xbox One

When it was announced, Halo: The Master Chief Collection was considered to be the reason to get an Xbox One. Four games for the price of one, the return of the matchmaking system that defined the birth of Xbox Live and a long awaited release of the Halo 2 anniversary edition. Upon release, while single player performed decently well, multiplayer was another story, with local play requiring enormous downloads (due to MS's cost cutting by shipping only one disc instead of two) and the matchmaking system at best taking forever to connect to imbalanced and underpopulated parties, and at worst could search for hours and not find a viable game. Worst of all is that 343 Industries was quite open about the fact that the graphics overlay for Halo 2 and the matchmaking system "update" were the only changes they would be making to the existing Halo games, meaning half the work they were supposedly doing turned out broken and in some cases worsened by their attempts to fix it. The good news is that after months of patches, multiplayer is finally up to a playable standard, although matchmaking still occasionally takes minutes. To compensate for the botched launch, 343 offered a remastered Halo 3: ODST campaign as free DLC to early adopters.

PlayStation 4 (PS4)

Ultra Street Fighter IV on PS4 was handled by Other Ocean Interactive, with the original game itself being handled by a team other than Dimps (who developed all the prior Street Fighter IV editions up until Arcade Edition 2012). This resulted with the PS4 version launching in a very sorry state, with graphicalerrors, audioerrors, and other glitches that didn't appear on the other platforms. Tournament Play organizers are all saying that if this can't be cleaned up come time for their events that the PS4 version will be disregarded in lieu of the Xbox 360 version. This is especially troubling considering a big complaint of the PS3 version is input lag and this game was going to rectify that along with running at a consistent 60 frames per second in 1080p while allowing PS3 players to use their existing sticks. But with all its myriad of inherent problems, the advantages it was supposed to bring seem to be moot unless they can be cleaned up. However, all of the issues have been fixed with three patches in the month following its release.

The PlayStation 4 version of Tetris Ultimate, a game that demands quick thinking and precise piece placement at later levels, became infamous for a framerate that could turn horribly choppy at random, including when manipulating pieces or navigating menus. It led to widespread mockery, with one review in particular pointing out that the classic Tetris game on the Game Boy had no such issues. Some point out that thanks to the Tetris Guideline — a series of requirements by The Tetris Company imposed on every new Tetris game — there's a Double Standard in which a game like this is allowed to pass, but highly-regarded games like Tetris: The Grand Master aren't simply because they deviate too much from what the TTC wants in a Tetris game.

The PS4 version of Broforce has a few issues compared to the PC version - the frame-rate is locked at 25-30 FPS and one of the covert operations simply won't load, trapping the player on a black screennote Luckily the player can just quit to the home menu and close the game. However, there is a bug where the game will simply stop reading player movement 2 seconds into the level as well as occasionally through the level which makes one covert op harder than it should benote The player has to perform a running jump off the ledge they begin on - attempting it too quickly will lead to the player falling into a Bottomless Pitmany times. Plus, the 'Random input failure' makes the level harder since it's a speedrun against a large exploding trail which the player needs to run on top of to get by) as well as a main level mission (Deathfield) near impossible.

LittleBigPlanet 3 is this within itself. Levels intended for 2 or 1 may not function correctly due to subtle engine differences, some of which can make more complicated, precision-requiring levels completely unplayable.

Of particular note are the chatting teeth in the Joker level of the DC Comics pack. In 2 the teeth stood still, whilst in 3 they move and rotate, often flipping over and rendering themselves undefeatable. While this isn't normally a problem as they're easy enough to skip, there are three prize bubbles that require you to bounce on top of a teeth's brain to reach. One in particular has teeth that constantly shoot far away from the box, requiring you to wait for when it's close to the box and the right way up. Oh, and if you went from PS3 to PS4, you are required to do this as your DLC progress isn't carried over. Hope you like constantly playing half the level with barely skippable cutscenes just for one bubble!

And on top of that, the Space Background material from the same DLC doesn't work, being rendered completely black and thus removing much of the magic of the Watchtower levels and any community levels that used it.

Miscellaneous Consoles

A DVD player example: After Digital Leisure did an overall good job on porting first two parts of that series with Dirk the Daring, they suddenly decided to port Dragon's Lair 3D: Return to the Lair as well. As the result of doubleGenre Shift (interactive movie -> third-person arcade -> interactive movie or something that resembles it), as well as completely non-cinematic camera angles during the gameplay and the badly decreased "clicks per minute" count (mainly caused by the fact that in the original DL3D, not everything was trying to kill you), Dragon's Lair III is probably what you should ignore just to buy their Dragon's Lair Trilogy alone. Even Tomb Raider did better when Angel of Darkness hit the DVD players, no matter if TR fans loved it or not..

Other illnesses include: Bonus Feature Failurenote From the start, you've got a lot of "extra art" which is either screenshots from the game, or screenshots from the original games, or, in very rare cases, some concept art and figurine photos; and when you complete the game, you get access to five bonus levels... with untextured Dirk and enemies. Yes, he will be white even before he becomes a skeleton., Anti-Climax Bossnote During the Mordrok boss battle, you should tap only one button, save for the moment when you have to turn right. And that's the final boss!, Scrappy Mechanicnote Some of the actions are clearly performed in a way different from the obvious way: You see a platform behind the Dirk, which is obviously situated above his head, perspective-wise, and you have to fly forward. What do you press? The down button.Wait, there's more! The three-minute Smithey battle is also screwed up: At the first round, you have to get rid of the sword, the spear and the anvil. Three more rounds and Dirk dodges them all by himself. On the fifth... you have to dodge the anvil yourself. Just dare to call that fair. and Yet Another Stupid Deathnote Except, this time around, it's played literally; sometimes, you have to wait 30 seconds watching Dirk stupidly standing in one place while Giddy Goons try to mash him up; bonus points for the fact that you can't skip these anyhow..

An old Visual Novel, called Exodus Guilty Neos, which has been previously released on PlayStation and Sega Saturn, was ported to DVD players not so long ago... and, apart from having fully voiced characters this time around, it throws all the interactivity it originally had out of the wall, so now, you have to wait till the end of any of these 30-minute chapters just in order to pick a decision. Side note: no alternate endings, three DVDs with 6 hours of video on each. While the originals ran on a single CD and had additional endings to run on. With such level of interaction, no one shall call it a game.

The PS4 and Xbox One ports of Lichdom Battlemage had the dishonor of being named the worst-ever performing PS4/Xbox One ports tested by Digital Foundry at the time. Both ports were weighed down by frame rates that rarely ever rose above 20 FPS, and Loads and Loads of Loading that could fill an average TV commercial break. The Xbox One port, on top of those problems, also washed everything in an extremely dark color palette, and screen tearing happens all too frequently thanks to the lack of vertical sync. Even worse, the tutorial videos shown during normal gameplay run fine, but they're simply taken from the PC version of the game. CryEngine 3, while it has had its share of console duds (most infamously Sonic Boom on Wii U) is capable of producing good results (Ryse: Son of Rome, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Evolve, etc.), so it's unfortunate that the console versions of Lichdom were released in such a dire state. Luckily, patches fixed these issues (though only mostly in the case of the PS4 version, which has an unlocked framerate that jumps everywhere in the 30-50 range).

Disastrous ports to hand-held consoles:

Handheld consoles are more likely to suffer this trope, due to many games going cross-platform and needing to accommodate the lower-powered hardware.

Game Boy/Game Boy Color (GB, GBC)

Animaniacs was a port of Konami's Genesis/Mega Drive game by Factor 5. Most of the gameplay was intact and the graphics, although taking an obvious hit due to the Game Boy's limitations, were clear and inoffensive. However, the game cut out the entire "Space Truckin'" stage and most of the final stage due to limited cartridge space and was clearly designed with the Super Game Boy's sound capabilities in mind, meaning that portable players were "treated" to some of the most obnoxiously high-pitched songs ever to come out of the Game Boy's sound chip.

Contra: The Alien Wars is a port of the SNES game Contra III that lacks the dual-wielding weapon system (admittedly due to the lack of buttons on the Game Boy), several boss characters (including the one-eyed brain at the end), and the entire motorcycle-riding stage. Although it's a bit unfair to expect a Game Boy port of an SNES game to live up to the original, this doesn't excuse the fact that the graphics, sounds and mechanics are all worse than Operation C (the previous Contra game released for the Game Boy), with a much slower playing speed to boot. Like Animaniacs above, the port was handled by Factor 5 rather than Konami themselves, which may explain some things.

Crystalis on the GBC is a complete butchering of the NES original — the original soundtrack was replaced, the controls were messed up, and then the game's framerate problems, plot changes, and other flaws cause most who have played the original to either deny its existence or wish the rating system went down to zero.

Made even worse by an attempt to dumb down the game. The main character wields four elemental swords, which he needs to switch between as certain creatures have immunity to certain elements. For example, poison bugs can't be hurt with the Sword of Wind. Apparently they didn't like the constant need to change swords, so instead they made it so all swords could hurt any creature, it's just that the wrong element did less damage. There is no audible way of telling if you're dealing partial damage, so it actually makes the game harder, since you don't know if you're using the right sword or not.

Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone was handled by Sales Curve instead of Technos, and rather than being a Reformulated Game like the GB version of the original (or a Dolled-Up Installment like the second), it's a straight port of the arcade version — and a pretty awful one at that. The player only has three moves (the basic punch and kick plus a jump kick, no consecutive attacks or grappling moves like in the previous GB games) and the game is pretty much impossible to complete in one life due to poor hit detection and the fact that the enemies have Mercy Invincibility when they recover after a fall. The player can purchase the hurricane kick move and a sword from item shops like in the arcade version (only with in-game currency instead of credits) and they even managed to botch that up (the sword cannot be carried over to another stage, making it a pointless item, the hurricane kick is about as effective as the standard jump kick and all the extra playable characters are missing). To top it off, the graphics are worse than the first two games, with bland character designs and stiff animation, only one sound effect for everything and the music is annoyingly repetitive (with the same three tunes played throughout the entire game).

Galaga: Destination Earth, rather than porting the complex 3D environments of the PC version, plays more like the original game in the Game Boy Color version by Pipe Dream Interactive. The only problem is... they didn't quite do it right. There was very little skill involved, as once you got your second ship, you could pretty much blindly fire forward and clear wave after wave, even without the double-damage power-up. However, if the enemies got a shot off, there was roughly a 50% chance it would hit you. Even if you were on the other side of the playing field. In addition to a lack of music and only three settings, not to mention a nigh-useless password feature, it was simply a trainwreck of a port.

The port of Lemmings for the original Game Boy was, for the most part, a direct port of the NES version, and so does not fit here. The Game Boy Color Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings... didn't fare nearly as well. The graphics are terribly downgraded, several levels are arbitrarily switched around (this includes making Across the Gap, a difficult level, from the Crazy difficulty, the second level of ONML), the Lemmings move at a ridiculously slow pace that makes clearing some levels nearly impossible, and the perfectly fitting Ear Worm-filled soundtrack was replaced with something much more generic and boring.

Marble Madness flings you back to the second stage after you beat the fifth, either because of a programming error or because the final stage doesn't even exist in this port. Have fun playing through the middle four stages until you run out of time or batteries, whichever comes first. The Game Boy Color version does have the final level... but you'll be lucky to ever reach it, as the ball controls and physics are just terrible, and the game ramps up the difficulty to unfair levels by reducing the time given to you in each maze. Adding insult to injury, the soundtrack is given an awful-sounding remix (the original Game Boy version just used the NES soundtrack), with several stages getting the wrong bits of music entirely.

Mortal Kombat has ugly black and white graphics which, OK, it's a Game Boy game. But the biggest problem was how slowly and jerkily it ran. Mortal Kombat II came out on the same system a few years later, but it ran at a much better speed and was all around more fun to play, so there isn't much of an excuse for this one. On top of that, some of the controls were changed for the worse and most of the fatalities were terrible.

Populous has almost indecipherable graphics that split up on three different screens (you had to switch) what you see in the PC/SNES version on one screen.

The original Prince of Persia was ported to dozens of systems, and some of the ports were pretty dire. The GB version was one of the worst. Here's a preview — yes, that is actually what the game sounds like. (And the GBC version released seven years later was nearly as bad!)

The original Puyo Puyo was pretty clunky and slow compared to most other versions of the game, and the lack of a colored screen obviously made differentiating between the different types of puyo a chore. The Game Boy ports of later games turned out significantly better.

The Game Boy port of Street Fighter II. It looks and sounds nice, but the porting team was clearly more devoted to recreating the look of the game than the feel, so everything else suffered. While the simplified moves and character lineup (only nine characters) can be forgiven due to the system's obvious limitations, the unresponsive controls, single digit framerate and slow as molasses physics utterly destroy the gameplay, leaving it a barely playable mess.

Toy Story shared the same layout on consoles and PC (with various design and/or level changes), pre-rendered 3-D graphics, a nicely varied soundtrack, and challenging (but not unbeatable) stages. The Game Boy version, however:

Was frustratingly slow — Woody moves and jumps like he's on the moon.

Had a more grating and repetitive soundtrack.

Had awkward hit detection, particularly when trying to use Woody's pull-string as a weapon or a grappling hook.

Had some poorly blended graphics. With the original Game Boy's unlit green screen, gameplay was all the more aggravating due to the complex textures and sprite designs.

Removed many levels, including all that were outside the "platformer" realm (the overhead racing levels, 3-D maze, etc.) and the boss fights (Nightmare Buzz, regular Buzz Lightyear, and the notorious Claw).

Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2 received GBC ports which, although impressive in how they were able to fit entire city maps on a cartridge as well as having a reasonable framerate, were mainly let down by horrible music and clunky driving controls which made the games very tedious to play. Although an effort is shown here, the attempt at trying to capture the feel of the superior PC/PS versions is weakened by the GBC's limited hardware.

Star Wars: Yoda Storieswasn't exactly the best PC game, but its Game Boy Color port could possibly be one of the worst Star Wars games of all time. To be fair, the original PC version is a casual game with randomly-generated levels meant to be played in short bursts, which sounds like it would suit a portable console perfectly. Unfortunately, every problem the PC version had - jittery controls, bad collision detection and unclear objectives amongst many other issues - were exacerbated by the GBC's hardware limitations and the variety from the PC version was significantly downgraded, turning what could have been a passable portable time-waster into a near-unplayable mess.

Game Boy Advance (GBA)

Bubble Bobble: Old and New is a compilation release that includes a port of the original arcade game. It was an utter disaster — you could either look at a blurry or squished-down view of the whole level, or not see part of the level, at all. The controls were also off. If that wasn't bad enough, the soundtrack was a terrible, tinny remix of the classic original. A result of the real-life case of No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup(according to this). Deaths and squishing yourself with bubbles did not match the arcade implementations. In the port, when you die, you still fall down, but you freeze in mid air when you start spinning out upon death instead of just before you poof away into magic dust. Also, upon death, the standing-not-dead sprite frame is used, followed by the sitting-down-dead sprite frame only when your character spins out. And they called the second player Bobblen, not Bobblun as it should be.

Contra Advance: The Alien Wars EX is technically better than the earlier Game Boy version, but still a butchering of the original SNES game. Not only does it still lack the dual-wielding weapon system (even though the player still carries a second rifle on his back), it also removes the mega bomb power-up that was previously kept in the original Game Boy version (which were activated in that version by pressing Select). The character sprites and backgrounds are lifted straight from the SNES version, but many of the larger bosses (like the tortoise and the skeleton robot) were squished to fit into the smaller resolution of the GBA, yet the player's sprite was left unchanged. Because of this, a lot of the larger enemies are harder to avoid than they were in the original due to the lack of space to maneuver. While the motorcycle stage is kept this time, along with all the bosses missing from the previous Game Boy version, the two overhead Mode 7 stages were replaced with two side-scrolling stages ported over from Contra: Hard Corps. However, the replacement stages were designed with the play mechanics of Contra: Hard Corps in mind, which featured a slide move that was not carried over to the GBA port, an ability that was almost necessary to avoid certain attacks used by the bosses in these new stages.

Earthworm Jim had an absolute train wreck of a GBA port. A huge chunk of sprite animations are cut from the game, the physics are broken, the ray gun and helicopter head sound effects are replaced with muffled-sounding ones, the music sounds like distorted versions of the SNES version's music, the A button is used as the fire button and B is the jump button and it is impossible to change, the graphics are messy, and the remaining sound effects from the original are distorted and their pitch is changed.

Earthworm Jim 2 is just as bad as the original, if not worse. It has most of the same problems and very few things were fixed from the previous port and even has its own fair share of problems. The graphics are slightly improved from the previous port but many sprite animations are still cut out of the game. The 3D-ish floor in the level "Puppy Love" is glitched up, and the music still sounds like distorted versions of the SNES version's music but with parts of the songs cut out. This port is widely known for its broken password system that literally loads a game where you instantly die for no reason.

Klax/Marble Madness, or at least half of it — the Marble Madness port in the pack is a lazy mess and literally half the game it used to be. The controls are unpolished, the marble teleports to the other end of the chute (instead of rolling down it), and the wave in Stage 3 is absent. The worst feature is that the game ends after Stage 3. There's no excuse for this, considering that ports for older systems managed to contain the whole game. At least the Klax port is good, despite also repeating after level 3.

Medal of Honor: Underground was an excellent World War II first-person shooter on the PS. The GBA version is... not. As you can see in this video, there are no redeeming factors to this game. The graphics look awful, and can best be described as the visual equivalent of baby vomit; horrendously low-resolution textures, terrible framerate, and the character sprites blend into the textures, so there's nearly no way to know if anyone is in front of you. The controls would be fine if there weren't such a horrific disconnect between command and action. Sometimes, your actions aren't even recorded. The sound is equally terrible, with heavily distorted voice samples and a soundtrack that sounds like an orchestra of farts. The FMV segments of the PS1 game are removed and replaced with boring-ass still-frame illustrations with text beneath them. And the AI is ridiculously stupid; in one mission you have to stay within four feet of your brother lest he lose track of where the hell he is and just stand around like a dumbass.

Mega Man & Bass fares a lot better than most other examples on this list (the hilariously bad translation of the Robot Database aside). The screen's understandably smaller, and the sound quality isn't as good (though the soundtrack has also been tweaked a bit, and there are some people who actually prefer the GBA soundtrack over the original Super Famicom one), but one thing that's never been defended is that Bass' dash command has been changed from its own dedicated button to double-tapping left or right, making it more awkward to use (which, in what is arguably the hardest game in the Mega Man (Classic) series is a big deal). They obviously did this because the GBA has less buttons, but couldn't they just make it the same input as Mega Man's slide instead?

Mortal Kombat Advance. The previous Mortal Kombat ports for the Game Boy and Game Gear were never exactly good, but Advance, a "port" of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was a trainwreck. Poorly done sprites, poorly ported music, AI that hovered between being stupidly easy or stupidly hard (especially Scorpion, who can easily ruin your game as early as being the first opponent), and various other screwups make this port a complete and utter mess. It was the first game in Electronic Gaming Monthly to receive a total 0 rating. Not a surprise, since Midway farmed this job out to a third party, with no involvement from Ed Boon's MK team, with the goal of churning out the game in four months to make a quick buck on the license. After this, it's no wonder that Midway hired Other Ocean to handle the DS port, which was much better.

Phantasy Star Collection ports Phantasy Star II and III perfectly, but the original game has two major issues. First, it will randomly crash upon exiting a battle — not too often, but often enough that any given playthrough will encounter it at least once. Second, the evasion stat was messed up completely. In an overlap with Good Bad Bugs, at specific levels each character cannot be hit by any attack. However, the corollary is that at all other levels the characters cannot evade even one attack. Also, the game will not work on Game Boy Player.

R-Type III features poor collision detection, missing features, and a broken and illogical scoring system, all the apparent result of the developers not having access to the original source code. They also replaced the excellent music with a terrible new soundtrack.

Rock 'N Roll Racing has two noticeable issues on the GBA, never mind that they left out Golden Earring's Radar Love (which was added to the Genesis version of the game): Firstly, the BGMs have been abridged (i.e. cut short and looped horribly, destroying the mood and the Rock 'N Roll part of the game). Secondly, it overcompensated for the GBA's lack of backlight so much that palette swap animations in some screens seem uniform and no longer animated (this is most noticeable on the car upgrade screen with a maxxed out car).

The same person behind the "Knuckles in Sonic 1" ROM hack made a much, much, much superior homebrew GBA port of Sonic 1, that even added Tails and Knuckles as playable characters; proving that whoever made Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis just didn't care. It's no surprise he was called upon to help develop the 2013 remastered version of the game released for mobile platforms.

The Sonic 1 port for the iPod Classic — the old ones that had physical click wheels — was more accurate than the GBA version, despite also having been recompiled from the original code.

If you somehow manage to slug through all the problems the game has and reached the end credits, the ending sequence has Sonic's auto runs become messed up because of the reworked physics engine, resulting in one part where he gets hit by an enemy, which doesn't happen in the original game.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 Upper got three new characters from Capcom Vs. SNK 2 in exchange for butchered sounds and stages, as well as no endings. Apparently it wasn't the developer's fault, however, since Capcom insisted on them using an 8 MB cart for whatever ridiculous reason, while 16 and 32 MB carts were available. They did try their best to at least fit all the play mechanics in those eight megabytes, as well as replacing World Tour with a set of options that more or less did the same thing and didn't require you to beat the mode with every single character that you wanted to be able to utilize them.

The Super Mario Advance series of ports are more along the lines of a Polished Port, as they do a good job of improving the graphics and gameplay of the originals as well as adding extra content. However, they have been labelled as bad ports by some for problems such as screen crunch, washed out colorsnote The first three ports were made with the original GBA model's dark screen in mind before the GBASP was announced; the SMB3 port averted this., missing graphical effectsnote Noticeable in Yoshi's Island, low sound quality, the abundance of voice acting and the decreased difficulty.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo occasionally suffers from a nasty game-freezing glitch, file erasure, or both at the same time. In case you're wondering, the GBA porting was done by the aforementioned Atomic Planet.

Tales of Phantasia is the first (and only surviving) official English version of the game note An official SNES localization that was cancelled was never dumped, and the iOS version was lost to time because of Always-on DRM. It suffers from awful voice acting and a lazy script that misspelled Ragnarok as Kangaroo, among many other issues. Even if that wasn't enough to turn you away, the graphics, music and framerate took a huge hit even in the Japanese version.

Tekken Advance is a downplayed version, as while it is is a rather good semi-port of Tekken 3, it is still flawed. The sprites were 3D models ripped from Tekken 3, shrunken and distorted to accommodate the GBA, with rather awkward results. Gameplay-wise, although the game remains fun to play, it is far less intuitive than the main Tekken games, due to its relatively inefficient button mapping. Instead of adapting the traditional limb-based gameplay used in the main games, they opted for "Punch, Kick, Throw, and Tag", which leads to much confusion when one goes from playing a main Tekken game to playing Tekken Advance.

The GBA ports of Jet Set Radio and Space Channel 5, dubbed Ulala's Cosmic Attack, are ambitious as all hell in attempting to bring over entire Dreamcast games to the small screen (and with considerable success). Unfortunately, they suffer from ugly graphics, inferior audio (which, in two games absolutely revered for their fantastic soundtracks, is unacceptable), and delayed (in Space Channel 5's case) or downright awful (in Jet Set Radio's case) controls.

PlayStation Portable (PSP)

Angry Birds has random framerate slowdowns and glitchy controls. Considering it's a PSP port of an iPhone game, it really shows how rushed the port was.

When Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 was ported from Xbox 360 to the PSP, it was generally understood that the graphics would be less impressive in the transition from console to handheld. Less acceptable were the increased loading times, the absence of any form of multiplayer, the removal of most of the new mini-games (including jet ski racing, water slide, and tug-of-war), or the over-simplification of the volleyball mini-game.

Dynasty Warriors looks like a mix of Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires and Dynasty Warriors for the GBA despite being a PSP game, and to add more insult, the crossover Warriors Orochi games don't have these errors.

The models are prone to be glitchy and Off Model, which usually happens when using the bow.

Sometimes, the game doesn't even remember if you were on a horse or not; it may or may not spawn you with a horse.

Final Fantasy Tactics' PSP port suffers from slowdown of something like 50% (that's half-speed animation) whenever a three-dimensional effect is processed. This renders almost anything except basic attacks twice as slow as the PS version. While the heavy script rewrite from the original (and from the Japanese version) is a debatable aesthetic issue, the slowdown makes long missions unnecessarily tedious. It's especially annoying because it's a PS game ported to superior hardware! Fortunately, the game makes up for this with extra recruitable characters, beautifully done (and voice-acted) cutscenes, a multiplayer mode, and other enhancements. Eventually fixed with a fan patch that removes the slowdown when the game is run through custom firmware. However, when Square Enix was approached about this problem (and why this slowdown is absent in the iOS ports), they decided this is "working as intended".

Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis got an especially atrocious PSP port. Not only were the loading times ridiculously long, but almost everything you did caused the game to lag for several seconds, whether it be bringing up the menu, switching characters in and out during battle, or even something as simple as jumping on the field. Sometimes it would get so bad that the game would just completely freeze up. It is somewhat alleviated by installing the game digitally.

Puzzle Quest was a decent port overall (like the DS version), but it's the only one with a major bug: The companion system doesn't work. It is also one of the extremely few PSP games which will occasionally crash to the XMB. The game has an option in the main menu that says "Exit", but all it does is crash the game on purpose so that the PSP throws the XMB up. On the Vita it throws up an error and ends the emulation. This is the only game on PSP to do this.

Spectral Souls is a direct PSP port of a PS2 original: done so without re-optimizing the game for the PSP's processor. Thus the PSP is trying to play a PS2 game and the end result is Loads and Loads of Loading for even the most simple of things, including reading dialogue.

Umihara Kawase Shun was a port of a PS1 game, the PSP version is riddled with bugs and features a very screwy physics engine. This led Japanese fans to boycott the port. The DS port is pretty much perfect, with accurate adaptations of both the Super Famicom and PS1 originals and even wireless support for sharing replays in spite of the DS being technically weaker than the PSP.

Bubble Bobble: Revolution includes a port of the original arcade version that was an utter disaster — it has the exact same problems as the GBA port. A result of the real-life case of No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup(according to this). Apparently, whatever plans the developer used for this port came largely from their GBA port. Not only that, the American version of the game contains a Game-Breaking Bug in the new mode where the boss in Level 30 is nowhere to be seen, making it unplayable, Eventually, the copies were recalled.

IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey was originally a solid console game based on a series of PC flight sims that were also critically acclaimed. In the DS version, however, the controls are sluggish and the D-pad is ill-suited for controlling a plane in three dimensions. some stages are unwinnable because the enemies can't be damaged, and the campaigns are just a series of missions that can be played in any order the player wants (which is just as well, considering the last flaw).

Legend of Kay is a port of a PS2 game featuring Ninja Gaiden-esque fighting, racing levels, a solid plot and a soundtrack by Virt. The DS version rips all of that out for random spider jumping, a complete butchering of the script, crappy MIDI files, and the complete elimination of the battle system that made the original fun to play in the first place.

Myst has its DS version seriously hampered by a couple issues. First, the DS' screen resolution is much lower than that of a PC; even with the "magnify" feature added to the DS port, some of the text within certain scenes is still barely readable. Even worse, though, the PC version used context-sensitive mouse cursors to point out when the mouse was over a hot spot; the DS has no equivalent to this at all, which led to aimless screen-tapping to try to figure out what to do. In a game like Myst, that's going to happen quite a bit — it's not that straightforward with AltTags... and there are Game Breaking Bugs in the port.

Rayman DS was a very sloppy cash-in port of a great game. The graphics are incredibly blurry and pixelated, the framerate jitters, and the music was taken from the N64 version's inferior MIDI tracks. Gameplay was also affected with the DS' lack of an analog stick, not to mention the game-breaking bugs (some of which could activate during cutscenes). It's clear that nobody cared about fitting the game to the DS hardware. Even worse is that Ubisoft did the exact same thing to the same game again on the next console!

The Settlers II stores data the whole time while you're playing until there is no space left on the cartridge and the game crashes. Scrolling was slow and made an annoying noise, the game would lag and the button to zoom in and out would often disappear due to the data overload. One chapter also has a glitch that deletes your saves when you choose it. Actually the developers recommend you to use said glitch in case the zoom button disappears. What made matters worse is that it was released a few months after Anno 1503 which showed that you can successfully port RTS games to the DS.

The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night suffered from a lot of issues on the DS, foremost of which was its graphics. Whilst ambitious, its attempt at a third person 3D perspective really stretched the capabilities of the DS, which resulted in very ugly and choppy environments and characters. The narrated cutscenes featured a very poorly rendered voice that only vaguely talked about the plot. A lot of the plot was left out, leaving most of the game very confusing as to what was going on, which, if you didn't understand what's what's going on, lead to a surprisingly large amount of Giant Space Flea from Nowhere. On the flip side, the music was at least decent.

Burnout Legends was an excellent PSP game, but the DS version failed in the areas of physics, graphics and speed — the most important aspects of a Burnout game.

The DS port of Syberia was made from the already bad smartphone port which suffered from a lot of missing expository text that turned things into Moon Logic Puzzles, rather than the original PC version.

As part of their never-ending quest to port the Genesis Sonic games to every platform imaginable, Sega released a Compilation Re-release called Sonic Classic Collection on the Nintendo DS. While not exactly horrible, instead of being native ports, however, the games run under emulation, and it turns out the DS didn't quite have enough CPU power to handle this. Most Sega Genesis games output a higher resolution than than of the DS's screens, and instead of cropping the screen, Sega opted for squashing the screen vertically, resulting in a hideous look. This music sounds off, and often glitches up. Finally, the framerate often lags when the action gets too fast, or when there are too many sprites on screen. Additionally, the version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 had its options menu cut off, making it impossible to access the sound test and input that game's cheat codes, and Sonic the Hedgehog 3's Competition mode was removed, resulting in its exclusive courses Dummied Out, even though there was an option to play a single player time trial on said courses. Lastly, the framerate is poor. To make matters worse, the games actually ran better and more smoothly in the emulator this "port" was based on, released before this collection.

Nintendo 3DS (3DS)

Asphalt 3D is a port of Asphalt 6: Adrenaline with severe framerate problems. The AI is even worse than in Asphalt 6, the crashes go all over the track, Game Breaking Bugs run rampant, and the 3D only serves to exacerbate issues. IGN rated it a 3/10, even worse than Asphalt Injection (see below).

Dragon Quest X's 3DS port, which is cloud-streamed, suffers from a number of issues, including the inability for a number of people to even log in and play the game, nigh-unreadable text thanks to the console's low resolution, constant maintenance, and sound problems.

Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed suffered an abysmal port to the 3DS. Unlike the DS version of the previous game, which used a custom engine to achieve 60 FPS (something not even the consoles did), the 3DS version of ASRT attempts to port the complete console game. The results are not pretty- graphics have been severely downgraded and the framerate regularly dips into the single digits. As a side effect, the controls are not responsive. Even the mobile port runs better....

The otherwise great Rayman Origins was ported to the 3DS without much concern for the console's lower-powered hardware and screen capabilities. As such, the framerate is noticeably jittery, the graphics are blurry, washed out, and too small to make out, and the audio quality suffers. That's not to mention the nearly non-existent 3D effect.

Rayman 3D was yet another port to Nintendo's handheld, this time from the Dreamcast version of Rayman 2. While it was (thankfully) improved over the DS version, it was still a lacking port; some framerate issues persisted, some graphic effects were removed (while very few were added), and it suffered from some irritating glitches. The most egregious glitch is the inability to collect the final Lum in the game, due to a trampoline platform acting as a regular surface. At this point there was no excuse; the 3DS is perfectly capable of playing the original game properly, unlike the DS.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth 3DS Port. Lag? Check! Glitches not found in other versions! Check! Updates that only made the game more unstable with one of the latest updates leading to a ludicrous amount of crashing from a update meant to fix game freezes? Check! And they say this 3DS game can only run on the New 3DS.

The port of Mega Man 5 on Mega Man Legacy Collection suffers from major performance issues such as slowdown and frame skipping when compared to the other games of the collection, or its Virtual Console release on the same platform for that matter. Oddly enough, Rockman 5, the Japanese version note the 3DS version of the collection includes the original Japanese versions of each of the games, which can be played in lieu of the English versions instead, doesn't exhibit this problem.

PlayStation Vita (PS Vita)

Asphalt Injection is another port of Asphalt 6 (geez!) released on the PlayStation Vita as a launch title, and while it isn't as bad as Asphalt 3D, it doesn't fare much better. The graphics are pleasant to look at, but it suffers from Fake Difficulty thanks to horribly botched collision detection (it is almost impossible to wreck if you glide on to the walls), and the police AI fare just as bad as in 3D. The racer AI doesn't even try to take you down, making the "Under Pressure" mode seem and feel pointless (in that mode you have to survive while the AI racers are supposed to wreck you, even though they don't). While IGN gave it a acceptable 6/10, EGM gave it a savage 3/10, citing how pointless Injection really was, and that there was no need for yet another port.

Borderlands 2 on the Vita is a good effort, but unfortunately, the console can't handle the game. The graphics are downgraded, the framerate is poor (20 FPS), co-op is reduced to 2 players, and it's very crash-prone. And Gearbox also forgot to increase the size of the text in your inventory in-game, requiring you to hold your Vita pretty close up to your eyes to be able to read the description of your weapon or skill tree. Later patches took the Vita version from 'unplayable' to merely 'really bad port.'

The PS Vita version of Dariusburst Chronicle Saviours, like its PS4 and Windows counterparts, has a port of Dariusburst Another Chronicle. Unfortunately, DBAC was designed for arcade cabinets using two 16:9 monitors side by side, and while it's feasible to play it on a single sufficiently large screen if you're playing on a PSTV, PS4, or a PC, no aspect ratio adjustments are made for the Vita, and as a result the 32:9 picture is crammed onto a 5" 960x566 display on which it is impossble to see anything.

Jak and Daxter Trilogy is a compilation of the three Jak and Daxter games originally on the Playstation 2. They were ported from the HD Collection on the PS3 to the Vita. That's great, if you're okay with bugs, extremely poor framerates for most of the gameplay (which can often go into single digits) and sound glitches. An even bigger slap in the face is that the first Jak and Daxter ran well. The second and third game however, are unplayable.

Minecraft is quite broken on the Vita. Aside from suffering from a highly limited world size, before the first patch, the game would randomly create a "Crashed" duplicate save. But what takes the cake is that the auto-save system will corrupt the save file if the game is closed incorrectly, as the Vita uses a different way to close games.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted on the Vita not only suffers from lag issues, it's also missing the SWAT trucks from heat level 6. The AI is full of Artificial Stupidity, and the traffic AI will ram into any crashed car, traffic car or not.

Terraria, in the Vita's case, suffered two major Game Breaking Bugs in its history. One, where after the 1.2 Update, corrupted all worlds that has the fireplace item. Two, which causes the vita to fail to save the game and cause a Crash to the Vita's menu. As of this writing, it's been unfixed for three months.

X Com Enemy Unknown Plus suffers from a massive amount of issues. Loading can take up to three minutes from startup to actually playing the game, and load times are still pretty long once you actually start playing. There are plenty of graphical glitches, which occasionally include not showing where a character's movement becomes dashing (which prevents them from taking another action) and the smoke from smoke grenades becoming invisible (with no sign when it wears off). The framerate also stutters every now and again. Using any item in a soldier's inventory when they're in cover has a chance of them clipping into it and being stuck and unable to move, even with explodes destroying the thing they were stuck on. And lastly, even if you do manage to get through everything, it has a tendency to crash later on in the game!

The port of Final Fantasy I to the Android platform. Support for tablets is abysmal, the music looping doesn't work as expected, the gameplay was altered without the game being adjusted to compensate.

The iOS port of Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, which has pretty bad lag on devices older than the iPad4 or iPhone5S (and even on these newer devices, it sometimes randomly crashes if you've updated to iOS 8.0), and only comes with 13 characters and two songs; you have to purchase the rest of the game's content separately (which, altogether, equals over $100 — for reference, the 3DS version, which already includes all of this content except some of the songs — some of which are exclusive to iOS, and some of which are DLC on both platforms — currently retails for $25 to $30). Also, Event Music Stages is completely omitted from the portnote If Square Enix's excuse is that there is not enough screen space, hey, couldn't they make it like Capcom with the Ace Attorney Trilogy and make the players hold the tablet or phone in Portrait orientation and divide the screen in half?.

Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI both suffer from an inconsistent art style that mixes cartoonish flatly-colored sprites with vastly more detailed backgrounds and enemy sprites, which looks awkward at the best of times. In some places, the background tiling is clearly visible, since no care was taken to make sure the transitions between tiles were seamless. On top of that, the original version of Final Fantasy VI not only featured a glaring typo in the very first scene of the game (which wasn't even in the Game Boy Advance port the game takes its script from), but a glitch in the cutscene where Kefka fights General Leo would cause the entire game to crash, a severe headache for players who hadn't saved in a while. Both issues were later fixed in a patch.

The port of the original Mega Man X on iOS. The sprites have been redrawn at a higher resolution, which sounds good, except that instead of actually hiring decent artists to redraw the sprites, like they did with Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, most of the sprites look like Capcom just ran the SNES sprites through some kind of graphical filter software. No new colors or detail have been added, making quite a few of the sprites look worse than the SNES version. Some of the animations have lost frames, looking choppier than the original, some of the music is lost, and the visually interesting graphical font used in the SNES version is replaced with a boring generic font.

The levels don't scroll smoothly anymore, rather being divided into discrete sections with loading between them. Perhaps worst of all, one of the things that set the game apart from other action games — the stage alterations — are completely absent: Flame Mammoth's stage is always on fire, Storm Eagle's ship doesn't crash into Spark Mandrill's stage, etc. Considering Maverick Hunter X, a remake for a system that is almost as powerful as the iOS, managed to include these, this is particularly inexcusable. How an almost 20-year-old game can be ported to a platform with immensely superior hardware and end up running worse is just mind-boggling.

The original iOS port of Mega Man 2 wasn't much better. Mega Man jumps higher than normal and falls much slower, some animations are off, you can leave and revisit any stage at any time, allowing you to farm the Emergency Energy Tank at the beginning of Metal Man's stage, the intro to the boss theme gets cut off, Wily doesn't jump out of his saucer before the final battle, the end credits were removed for some unknown reason, and it features an Easier Than Easy difficulty.

The original releases of the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis versions of Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 on the iPhone. The original iPhone's hardware may well have been plodding for a modern smartphone, but it still had a 400MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM versus the Megadrive's 7.6MHz CPU and 64KB of RAM. Yet both Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 were awful, stuttery messes compared to the originals despite running on vastly superior hardware. This was due to the use of emulation; Steve Broumley is credited as the developer of the official emulator used (no offense, Steve). Also, how they got it past Apple's "no emulators" policy is a Riddle for the Ages, although it's known that Apple turns a blind eye to AAA-grade game developers.

Averted when Sega finally commissioned Christian "The Taxman" Whitehead, creator of the fan-made Retro Engine and fresh from porting Sonic CD to several different platforms, to release a new version of Sonic 1 for the iPhone (and Android) built using the said engine, allowing for a smooth framerate, perfect sound and widescreen support. It also allows you to play as Tails (complete with flight) and Knuckles. Best of all, it comes as a free update for those who purchased the first port. The same Christian Whitehead was later commissioned to recreate Sonic 2 on the same engine, with the ability to play as Knuckles, flying Tails, and even the previously Dummied Out Hidden Palace Zone.

The Japan-exclusive Android port of Sonic Advance. Only Sonic is playable, the controls are all mapped to one virtual D-pad (minus the action button), the music is replaced by cheap MIDI files, the sound effects seem to be missing, and certain effects are missing (such as the lights at the beginning of Secret Base Zone Act 1).

The main Ace Attorney trilogy was initially ported over to iOS systems with a grab bag of imperfections. Game-breaking bugs, much slower animations (and several lost frames of animation), characters that no longer blink, a missing theme for Pearl, and the complete removal of the explanation for the fingerprint system. It also has multiple typos, bad text formatting and multiple mixed up item descriptions, as can be seen here◊ (contains spoilers for the first game). Thankfully, Capcom later fixed most of these mistakes and took great care when the time came to port Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies, which was lauded as a Polished Port.

The iOS and Android versions of the Grand Theft Auto series are decent for the most part, apart from the different and sometimes frustrating control scheme, but what's even more frustrating are some bugs and screwups such as framerate issues, and the fact that War Drum Studios, an outside developer Rockstar commissioned to port the games, hastily compressed the textures for Mali GPU users (e.g. Galaxy S2 and some versions of the Galaxy S3) making it look like as if it came off Minecraft. Squeezing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas into half the size of its original 4GB version was quite a feat, but while some won't mind the lower-bitrate audio, other GTAForums users noted that War Drum could've encoded it better. Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories is no better than San Andreas, because apart from having the same problems as the previous games, it also has very limited graphics settings & compatibility issues with some phones & tablets (particularly with Mali GPU devices), where the game refuses to work anywhere past the main menu. The fact that the port of Liberty City Stories was made by a different studio, Lucid Games, instead of the usual War Drum Studios, doesn't help.

With the 2014 iOS port of Tales of Phantasia being offered for free, the foolish player who ignored that telltale sign and downloaded the app will be in for a nasty surprise. Difficulty settings have been cut entirely, so you're permanently locked into the real game's Harder Than Hard setting. This means that enemies can and will beat your ass six ways to Sunday unless you paid a visit to an added shop beforehand, which has amongst its merchandise a special item that will resurrect a slain party on the spot with a temporary stat boost. Of course, there's a catch - the gear for sale in this shop can only be bought via microtransactions. In short, what was a perfectly serviceable RPG on the SNES and a less so but, still playable, Game Boy Advance RPG has been butchered into nothing short of a blatantly cynical cash grab. Oh, and not only have experience gains been slashed to make level, grinding even more tedious (which, naturally, the aforementioned cash shop sells items to expedite), but the number of save points has been drastically reduced just in case you thought you could brute-force your way through with a mortal patience level. Have "fun". And as a kick to the groin for the people that did pay for IAP in the game repetitively to progress, well, it was pulled from the iOS store in August 28, 2014, just six months later. That's bad enough as it is, except that the game also requires an always-on Internet connection and is not playable offline, and your games are saved on Namco's servers, meaning once the game is pulled, all you're left with is a useless space-waster on your iDevice.

The initial Android release of Cytus has audio sync issues, which is a Game-Breaking Bug in nearly every Rhythm Game; the issue is not present in the iOS version, which was released first. Fortunately, the version 4.0.4 update added a timing calibration feature.

It's not that Firaxis didn't give it the old college try with the iOS port of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but it does have quite a few problems: The graphics have been immensely scaled down (to the point that it looks like it's running on the Unity engine, whereas its PC counterpart ran on Unreal Engine 3), about 80 maps were cut, it has a large tendency to crash on older iDevices, and the DLC didn't get ported at all... until 2014, when Enemy Within finally got ported across — iOS gamers had to wait a full year.

Tomb Raider is a great game with complex, frustrating controls. When the game was ported to iOS without making any touchscreen concessions, the results were predictable....

The Mini Man got ported to Android and lampshades this trope, because on the itch.io's game page, the creator acknowledges the bugs: "sloppy and unstable Android port". The bugs? The music kicks the bucket after each death for the next five levels; it's also a random mess of songs from the Internet, because the Android exporter of Multimedia Fusion can't play MIDI, the songs are picked randomly every five levels. The controls are also broken, and the game is a direct port from PC, but it uses the PC levels and controls "slapped" on Android.

BioShock on iOS is exactly what you'd expect. The graphics were downgraded from the PC and console versions, and touchscreen controls are clunky. The game is no longer available from the App Store, though that has more to do with iOS 8.4 causing the game to no longer work.

The mobile version of One Finger Death Punch is technically very well done, with the responsive controls and satisfying combat of the original. What renders the game nearly unplayable is the move to a Freemium model. Buying the (cheap) PC/XBLA version gives you the whole game, but on Android and iOS it's a free download with all the worst features of free-to-play. Unless you pay, unlocking content takes an insane amount of grinding. Unless you pay, you'll only ever have one or two hit points, even though standard levels of the original give you ten. Unless you pay, you can only play for five minutes before you have to put it down for an hour.

Syberia was butchered in its conversion to Symbian and Windows phones, with a lot of explanatory text removed that reduced several puzzles to Moon Logic. This bad port was then ported to the Nintendo DS.

Other Handhelds

A significant amount of the Game.com's library was made up of horribly done ports of popular titles on other systems. The main examples:

Sonic Jam was practically an In-Name-Only version of the Saturn original. There was nothing from the original Sonic the Hedgehog, and only two levels each from the other three Genesis titles. On top of that, the graphics were barely adequate, the music sounded like a drunk guy playing a keyboard for the first time, and Sonic handled more like an actual hedgehog than his speedy self. Quite possibly the worst Sonic game ever made, beating out the much-maligned '06 and even the GBA Sonic 1 (see above).

Mortal Kombat Trilogy for the Game.com is a lousy port with grainy graphics that tend to blend into the backgrounds, combined with a single-digit framerate, the inexplicable absence of Scorpion and Sub Zero, a heavily simplified moveset that reduces the gameplay to button mashing with bizarre physics, and no music whatsoever, with only sporadic, lousy sound effects accompanying the action.

Duke Nukem 3D was actually a pretty admirable effort in many ways, and easily the most graphically advanced title on the system. Unfortunately, the Game.com wasn't anywhere near powerful enough to handle the Duke. Consequently the game got turned into a Rail Shooter, and the whole thing became one Luck-Based Mission due to the crappy controls and unbelievably slow framerate.

Sonic N for the Nokia N-Gage was a fairly faithful port of the original Sonic Advance in many ways, but still fell down badly compared to its predecessor. This was partly due to the N-Gage simply being poorly suited to running this type of game (the vertical aspect ratio of the screen and the weird control layout being the major issues), but the game was also an Obvious Beta on top of that. In addition to the whole game crashing at times, Sonic could actually run off the edge of the screen, often resulting in him dying one way or another.

Disastrous ports to PC operating systems:

Ports on computers can be disastrous either due to older computer systems lacking certain capabilities that consoles or arcade machines have, developers undermining the higher-end capabilities of newer ones, or simply not bothering to program the game in question to run properly on a computer.

Apple II

Paperboy has a very badly done, almost nightmarish intro song. It can't even keep its tempo consistent, and it approximates vibrato by repeatedly playing adjacent notes.

Commodore 64 (C64)

Bionic Commando had two C64 versions — one by Capcom USA and one by Software Creations UK, both based on the arcade version. The Software Creations version is a glorious aversion of this trope, pretty much porting the game as well as the C64 would allow, and sporting a superb remix of the soundtrack by Tim Follin. The Capcom version is astoundingly half-assed. There's only one music track, much blockier graphics, jerkier scrolling, sluggish movement, and absolutely no swing physics.

Cisco Heat features a truly abysmal framerate, non-transparent sprites for the AI cars, and generic backgrounds that look nothing like San Francisco. For proof that racing games can be more gracefully converted from sprite-scaling triple-16-bit-CPU arcade hardware to the relatively puny 8-bit C64, see Power Drift.

Enduro Racer has graphics that would be acceptable but for choppy and inconsistent scrolling: The player bike and the roadside stripes move at a decent rate, unlike everything else on the road.

Hard Drivin' wasn't designed for the hardware it was being ported to and is often noted as the worst port of the game in existence. It moves at a snail's pace in both framerate and actual driving speed and the controls often had you skidding across the road during even the slightest turns. The incredibly butchered physics engine, the very short draw distance, and the relatively inaccurate drawing scheme and monochrome nature of the 3D engine itself didn't help matters.

Jet Set Willy, a port of a ZX Spectrum game, tried to stretch the levels and jumping distance to fit the C64's higher graphical resolution. The result was oddly asymmetric Jump Physics and 100% Completion being impossible. You could still technically reach the ending sequence, except that the porting team didn't program that in.

The Legend of Kage suffered massive graphical and audio downgrades when it was ported from the arcade to many home consoles and computers. The C64 version is largely considered the worst port out of them all.

R-Type has a serious problem on tape: Even if you only survived for a minute, you still had to rewind the tape and wait five minutes for the game to reload.

Rastan Saga was a port of the arcade version. While they did a decent job of the music, the gameplay was destroyed:

Enemies would constantly spawn if you stood in the right spots, summoning swarms of enemies that you would likely be unable to pass without damage.

The hit detection was also broken, often causing you to die from enemies that were "attacking" with melee strikes that were out of reach.

The bosses had no visible markers if you were hitting them properly, nor was there any way to dodge their attacks reliably.

The weapons (with the exception of the golden sword) offered no change from your standard blade, so no throwing axe, no extending mace, no reason to bother with any weapon aside from that golden blade.

Last, the landscape was altered slightly, causing one of the jumps in a late-game level, to be impossible to clear.

Renegade III The Final Chapter, an already terrible ZX Spectrum game was made even worse by a draining health bar that you regenerate killing enemies, which is a chore with the awful collision detection.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a port of the NES version. The reduction of the audio quality, the password Copy Protection, the likelihood that more than five sprites on-screen would cause severe flicker... all these might be forgivable. But the biggest problem was that they attempted to emulate the NES controls on a joystick. With only one fire button available, they decided to assign both tasks to that button. To attack, you would very briefly tap the fire button, while jumping required you to hold it down instead. This made it nearly impossible to defeat the mini-boss of the first stage (Bebop), much less completing the game, as holding the button for any length of time longer than that brief period would result in a tiny hop instead. Combined with the short-range weapons of this game...

Ultima VI was butchered horribly on the C64. Because the C64 system so immensely popular, Origin kept porting their Ultima games to the system even after the hardware couldn't handle them anymore. While Ultima V was a complete port that lacked only music (and had even that — and very good, too — on the Commodore 128 in native mode), Ultima VI was designed for the much more powerful computers then available, so a lot had to go.

ZX Spectrum

The ZX Spectrum version of Count Duckula II is hideously ugly, especially considering its 1992 release date. The Commodore 64 version is actually quite colorful, but on the Spectrum everything that moves in the main Platform Game section is black on solid white backgrounds, even the tomato juice that can be fired into enemies' faces. While such graphical compromises were typical of the system, in this case they don't really make things move more smoothly. Instead, the already sluggish gameplay becomes a flickering nightmare, with the jack-in-the-boxes actually skipping some of their animation frames.

Kung Fu Master has backgrounds about as well detailed as those in the Commodore 64 version, but given the ZX Spectrum's graphical limitations, this comes at a horrible cost: The game moves along at a snail's pace, and kicking and punching enemies results in nasty flickering as the differently colored sprites come into contact.

Sqij! was originally an undistinguished Shoot 'em Up written for the Commodore 64. The ZX Spectrum version is far, far worse. It starts by turning on the Caps Lock and then only checking for lower-case letters. It runs far more slowly than the Commodore version because it's mostly written in BASIC. Not only that, but there's only one room in the game, as going left leads to nowhere, while going right crashes the game. The overall impression is that it was written by someone whose acquaintance with the original game extended to having it described to them over a bad telephone line.

Amstrad CPC

Ghosts 'n Goblins received an absolutely horrible CPC port. As if the game wasn't hard enough already, the Amstrad version ups the ante by removing the armour. Yep, in this version of the game Arthur is a One-Hit-Point Wonder, touching any baddie will kill you instantly. Also, the zombies respawn at a ridiculously fast and constant rate, and the version of the music is enough to induce nightmares. Check it out here, but make sure you swig some brain bleach afterwards.

OutRun has its CPC port handled by Probe Software. The programmers really had no excuse, as far better driving games had already been available on the CPC for years. How bad was it? Well....

The graphics gave no sense of acceleration or speed, and mostly looked like cars and unidentifiable roadside objects blinking into existence and jerking erratically towards you.

The crash animations were gone; your car just made a quiet "barp" noise and came to a dead stop.

The only other sound effect was a generic "boop-boop-boop" noise that - given that it usually happened when cornering — was probably supposed to be squealing tires.

The catchy in-game music was missing. The original release did at least come with a cassette tape of the arcade tunes, but anyone buying a budget/compilation re-release was presumably out of luck.

There was an expanded version for computers with 128K of memory. This had passable (though inexplicably mangled) in-game music and improved sound effects. Crashes now sounded like maracas being thrown out of a window.

Count Duckula 2 takes the already awful ZX Spectrum conversion, keeps all of that version's issues and turns it into something that makes E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Superman look like Chrono Trigger. Stuart Ashen took a look at it in the book Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of.

Zynaps: The Amstrad CPC conversion may be superficially good-looking, but the vertical resolution of the gameplay window is somehow less than that of the ZX Spectrum version, despite the fact the ZX Spectrum's native display resolution has 8 fewer pixels vertically. This results in less maneuvering room for the player's ship, aggravated by its having a larger collision box which makes the final stage unwinnable without cheating.

MSX

Fantasy Zone was a port of the Master System version of the game, except worse in just about every conceivable way. Garish graphics, slow, stuttery gameplay, badly ported music, and inexplicably altered bosses (the boss of world 7, which even the Master System portrayed as splitting apart and reforming while trying to crush you, was turned into a generic "move around and shoot projectiles" boss no different from any of the others) are among the major flaws.

Green Beret, a port of the side-scrolling action game by Konami, plays incredibly slowly and stiffly in its MSX version. Konami UK was responsible for this port, which was never released in Japan.

Jet Set Willy, despite coming out on 8-bit Atari systems three years after the Spectrum original, was actually inferior with a "worst of both worlds" approach to graphics, poor animation and bugs that meant the game couldn't be completed. Although the new music from Rob Hubbard was praised, it wasn't enough to save the game from the critical panning it received.

MS-DOS (DOS)

Bad Dudes had EGA graphics, tiny characters, and no clock speed adjustment, which means the game is unplayably fast on computers made just a few years after its release.

Castlevania had lackluster controls, and the holy water did not stun enemies, losing its strategic advantage.

Mega Man X had a pretty spotty PC sport, having lower-grade music and sounds than the SNES original, as well as removing the various Ride Armors around... despite being on CD-ROM and not limited by cartridge space. It also came with a gamepad modeled after a Sega Genesis 6-Button controller for whatever reason. The X3 PC port thankfully avoided these problems, not to mention had high-quality remixed music. The original did have a Windows port, but it was released only in Japan.

The gamepad (which also came with a PC port of Super Street Fighter II) was especially bizarre. Only the bottom row of buttons seem to actually work with the game. Try changing the controls to use any of the top three buttons and they're totally unresponsive. The same goes for other DOS games. Basically, you got a 3-button gamepad that looks like a 6-button gamepad.

The music is especially bad because the person responsible for writing the MIDI versions apparently didn't know how to use the drum channel, resulting in all the drums being random thumping on various melodic instruments. This, in turn, causes a bizarre situation where the music actually gets worse the better your soundcard is. The real reason of this is technically caused by lazy porting and hardware limitations of the PC: The SNES' SPC700 is a wavetable synthesizer, while most PC sound cards only have an OPL2-based FM synthesizer (similar to that of a Sega Genesis, but much more limited in that a Genesis also has a PSG for percussion — which the PC doesn't have, and could also use the OPL2 for digital audio — which the PC can't). Combine that with the fact that some games are optimized for the AdLib sound card (which has an even more crippling limitation of not being able to handle percussion well) and you have an audio-centered porting disaster in the making. Yes, there were better sound cards on the market (and even wavetable synth cards) when that game came out. For some reason, though, many PC game developers and porting houses just didn't care until the mid-'90s.

Street Fighter got a DOS port... the less said about it, the better. The characters were rendered at an approximate height of twelve pixels, Ken was replaced with a palette swap of Ryu, only a single punch and a single kick button were available, and while the computer could use special moves, the player couldn't.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wasn't exactly excellent on the NES, but its PC port featured broken controls (e.g. making it nearly impossible to jump precisely), jumpy framerates, cheap enemy placement, etc., and was, in fact, unwinnable without the use of cheat codes due to a design flaw in the sewers of Area 3 (there's a jump that's too wide with too low a ceiling). Also, despite what the manual said, you'll never find a single Boomerang or Shuriken in this port.

Oscar, as with the SNES port of the game, was a port of the Commodore Amiga version (like so many games from the time). It itself had features cut, as this opening video from the Amiga version shows us. Hear! Stereo sounds that put AdLib and SoundBlaster audionote The most common audio cards to shame note Granted, a later model SoundBlaster could actually do better and had the potential of sounding close to the Amiga version, but the PC version seemed to only be optimized for the AdLib music card.. See! Fluid smooth background animation along with an animated title logo! Despair! As you realize that the PC version had mediocre sound and a barely passable 16-bit static title logo. Also, like the SNES version, the title screen music was a rewritten horrible sounding MIDI train wreck instead of that awesome-o piece on the Amiga version.

The PC version of Uncharted Waters: New Horizons technically got the shortest stick of all the ports of the game, with a crippled MIDI track that's only optimized for the AdLib music card, inability to support Sound Font enabled cards like the Gravis Ultrasound or SoundBlaster AWE32 for instrument samples even though both cards were already released when the game came out (which could've made the game music sound just as good, if not better than, the SNES port if the game supported it and the PC has the card installed), and not only had the least amount of graphical effects of all the ports, it even failed at simple graphical effects like smooth screen scrolling. Additionally, the game used only EGA colors instead of VGA color, causing less colors to be available to the game and resulting in duller graphics. For a game that came out in late 1994 when VGA was common and EGA was already on the way out, and the common sound card was the marginally better, music-wise, OPL-3-based SoundBlaster 16 (which supported stereo MIDI and enhanced percussion compared to the OPL-2-based original Soundblaster and AdLib), the game has "lazy port" written all over it.

Rayman (1995), while playable, is missing many graphical effects from the console versions, has less more limited palettes, removes some frames from the sprites' animations, remaps crouching to an unintuitive and awkward key combination, and handles the music awkwardly: whereas previously, each world tended to have multiple level BGMs that were spread across its multiple stages, the PC version had one per world that combined all tracks into one, starting the next one when the current one finishes playing. Even worse, some of those tracks had totally different moods one from another, so now you have the forest music which changes from a cheery theme to a urgent-sounding track for no reason. An enhanced version with more levels called Rayman Gold was released later, but it removed the FMVs, and some versions lack the music altogether. Yet another enhanced version, Rayman Forever, followed, but the FMVs were still missing, and many music tracks were removed to make space in the disc. As if that wasn't bad enough, the game's code wasn't altered to reflect this, so now some areas in the game lack BGM, while others plays the wrong track; for instance the forest levels use the cave music now! Even the GOG.com, version of Rayman Forever suffers from these problems despite being officially dubbed ‘the definitive version of the first Rayman game' by the GOG.com website.

Karnov was released on PC in 1989, and most PCs of the time just didn't have the graphics hardware to draw a smooth side-scrolling background. If you had multiple enemies on-screen and it was scrolling, the game would slow to 1/2 to 1/3 of its normal speed unless you had a top-of-the-line computer. This ended up greatly reducing your needed reaction time, making the game trivial to complete.

Bubble Bobble had EGA graphics and AdLib musicnote Although setting up the game to run with AdLib music was a case of Guide Dang It since it doesn't come with a configuration program like other DOS programs of the era does. Many who've gotten the game without a manual were stuck with PC speaker sound since this was before the internet had become widely available, which were fine for the time, but the game breaker here is that faster PCs actually had an opposite effect on the game speed: the faster the PC, the slower the game. On a 166 MHz Pentium, the game would run at an unplayable one frame per second. Comparatively, the game ran perfectly on a 12 MHz 80286. The bug appears to manifest if you use a CPU faster than a 486DX-33. A fan-made patch to fix the issue exists however.

Mad Dog McCree featured poor controls (mouse clicking was no substitute for pointing a light gun) and FMV scenes that were enothing to write home about. When ALG finally released the PC Gamegun, its accuracy was horrible. All the PC ports of other American Laser Games titles suffer from the same issues.

Tomb Raider was originally developed for the Sega Saturn and PlayStation. When it was ported to PC, the quality of the FMVs was severely decreased, the reflection effect on Golden Lara was removed, and worst of all, all of the game's music was removed except for the title screen theme and cutscene dialogue (which was stored as CD audio). Ambient sound was added to the levels as a compromise, but an entire game with no music whatsoever was ridiculous. This was made even worse when the Sold Out Software version of the game was released, some copies of which were missing the few remaining CD audio tracks. So, during cutscenes, gamers would be "treated" to the characters silently bobbing their heads at each other. This was remedied by a patch that not only restores the missing tracks, but also all the tracks from the PS1 and Sega Saturn versions of the game. Justice has finally been served!

Twisted Metal lacks transparency on PC, and increases the resolution but in turn scales down the UI to a microscopic size. The almost unknown PC port of Twisted Metal 1 did replace a single weapon to make one of the characters viable, though.

Wipeout loses the light effects on PC, which wouldn't be so terrible if they weren't what made it such a graphically awesome title in '95. It also acquired a peculiar kind of flickering track bug. Lastly, the opening cinematic had a random probably of locking up certain PCs while playing...

Metal Gear received a DOS port, based on the NES version, which is apparently impossible to complete without cheating (the level 7 key card can't be obtained in normal gameplay). It also features ear-stabbing music, dubious AI, one-time-only item pickups, and a possible oversight that allows you to bail out of the final boss fight.

Microsoft Windows (WIN)

Acceleration of SUGURI X-Edition HD was rushed to Steam, and the numerous bugs at launch shows. The game had issues with crashing frequently, online multiplayer bugged or not working properly, compatibility problems with Windows 8/8.1, screen flickering problems in fullscreen, and broken Steam Achievements.

Assassin's Creed II has extremely clunky copy protection; users who legitimately bought the game and then used the crack to get rid of it anyway consistently report that the game runs exponentially better, going from a chugging slideshow at low or medium detail settings to completely smooth while maxed out and running at 1080p. Those who simply pirated the game get a product that is not only less annoying but actually works better than those who paid for it. The online-only DRM was later removed from the game, but it still suffered from poor mouse control due to aggressive acceleration, and controller support for the newer XInput gamepads was shoddy and required a third party fix to function correctly.

Assassin's Creed: Unity has became notorious for its poor optimization, alarmingly high system requirements (GeForce GTX 680 is the minimum video card requirement) which will bring high-end machines to their knees, and many game-breaking bugs. The port also suffers from a bad LOD system, and the profile for machines running SLI is broken. Add this, to stuttering even on machines with the recommended requirements, and Ubisoft still hasn't fixed these issues even after updates. While the console version doesn't run well by any stretch, the PC port is unplayable.

In a wider sense, the PC version of every major Assassin's Creed title since Black Flag onward suffers from an issue that makes the game incapable of progressing past the opening splash screen if not installed to the C: drive, which in the following years has caused complaints from users with custom PC builds that use smaller, more expensive SSDs as their native OS drives for a speed boost. Closer examination shows that the cause of this apparently lies with the sound files, and can be overcome by hosting only them on C: and creating symbolic links to them in an external install location. However, Ubisoft support seems to be completely unaware or uncaring about this, since every time the issue is brought up they seem to be in the dark about it, and useful advice on the matter can only be obtained from other users.

Batman: Arkham City had its PC versions delayed for well over an entire month, and had little to show for it upon release. It has ridiculously unoptimized graphical settings, forces Direct 11 despite its infamous bugginess, contains crippling DRM and sometimes has problems with connecting to Games for Windows Live for absolutely no reason. The latter two were finally removed entirely in a 2013 patch that coincided with their removal from its predecessor Arkham Asylum. Also, there's an issue with the Game Of The Year edition that prevents the disc from running at all, citing an AppID issue. It's unclear whether this was a humongous error of judgment or a backhanded way of driving people to Steam.

Batman: Arkham Knight: The PC port had even more problems than the aforementioned Arkham City at launch, with widely reported optimization problems, frame rates capped at 30 and regularly dipping as low as 10, and missing graphics options compared to the console versions. Many angered customers left negative reviews on Steam and Metacritic, and not only was Steam's new refund option for digitally purchased games put through its paces, but services like Green Man Gaming that previously had no refund policy made a special exception to allow players to return Arkham Knight. Response was so bad that WB Games suspended the game's saleless than 2 days after release to buy themselves time to fix the game. Subsequent patches added some missing graphical features and reportedly ameliorated the problems for some, made them worse for others, and had no appreciable effect for the majority. Since being rereleased on October 28, 2015, the game is still rife with technical issues. WB Games has stated that no major fixes are forthcoming and has offered no-questions-asked refunds to anyone who's purchased the game or its season pass through the end of 2015. Reportedly the sorry state of the game was known well in advance of its initial PC release and the suspended sale period did almost nothing to help it.

Arkham Knight also uses nVidia's proprietary Gameworks technology, making the game run slowly or not at all on AMD cards.

Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg's PC port, released in 2006 (three years after its original Nintendo GameCube release), suffers from poor optimization, which causes framerate issues on many video cards, severe screen-tearing problems (due to having no V-Sync) and very limited controller support. The sound mixing is also inferior to the GameCube version of the game due to using different audio code. The launcher's settings are too basic, the only graphics settings to change the framerate to 30 FPS or 60 FPS, resolution and a clipping option which doesn't seem to do anything. Most controllers are incompatible with the game, as it doesn't support analog triggers and many analog pads. For example, the Xbox 360 controller's analog triggers will not work.

BioShock 2 is another game that was plagued with both Games for Windows LIVE and SecuROM (2K claimed the latter was only programmed to prevent preordered copies from being playable before the official release, but that doesn't mean it won't ever have technical issues), but it was a badly coded port to begin with. It eats up 100% of the available CPU clock cycles at all times, even when it's idling in the menu screen, and there's flagrant texture pop-in if you're using a GPU without a lot of video memory — both problems that the first game, which runs on the exact same engine, didn't have. Apparently the whole thing was ported from scratch by a different team than the first game. In addition, some of the default key bindings are different from the first game for no discernable reason (Use is F instead of E, despite E not being used for anything, for example), attempting to rebind any keys used in the hacking minigame (like F) caused the minigame to not work at all, and the game didn't even have controller support despite being a port of a console game! Those issues, at least, were finally ironed out in a 2013 patch that also removed the DRM and switched the multiplayer system to Steam, as well as unlocking all the multiplayer DLC free of charge and giving existing players Minerva's Den as well since they had no way of knowing who had already bought it and who hadn't. Oh, and also the vending machines didn't talk and still don't, but a lot of users consider that one a good thing.

The Steam version of BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger lacks online multiplayer. But even if you have someone to play with locally, the controller assignment screen only lists one input device, so local multiplayer is also impossible. That's right: a fighting game with no multiplayer whatsoever, despite being released several years after its fully functional console version. The only reasons to get it are its story mode and the fact that it comes with a digital version of the soundtrack.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is infamous for the disastrous launch of its PC version. On release, a line in the servers' config file that hadn't been set properly caused every online game played to lag terribly. This was fixed after a few days, but the game still had some obvious problems with its renderer (not present in any of the previous current-gen titles that use the same engine) that cause ridiculous framerate drop when shadows are enabled and when sounds are played for the first time. Still, the game was much more playable, especially if you were willing to live without shadows. A few days after that patch, a second patch was released that was supposed to improve server browser functionality and fix several bugs with the browser. The patch did this... but also reintroduced all the problems the first patch fixed.

The 2013 installment Call of Duty: Ghosts has suffered similar problems. Framerate issues, narrow field of view (a fan-made tool was made, but was promptly taken down by Activision), and using way too much CPU power than it should (its minimum requirement lists 6 gigs of RAM when fans have found out the game itself would probably only need 2 or 3 for itself at minimum).

Call Of Duty Black Ops III also has serious issues: Even on high-end machines, the framerate can dip into the twenties or teens for no apparent reason, and the switch between 60 FPS in cutscenes and 30 FPS in gameplay is downright jarring.

Cars 2: The Video Game is this on the PC. While the models of the characters were okay, the scenery was terribly downgraded so that some of the features were missing or just simplified.

This certainly has something to do with the game's target audience, as relatively fewer children have access to higher-end systems, instead making do with whatever OEM-branded system their parents bought for them or as the family system.

darkSector was actually a fan-made PC port that got adopted by the publisher and sold for cash on Steam. It definitely shows. The graphics are usually off if you run the game in widescreen or on anything other than the default resolution, and if you use custom key bindings the quicktime prompts still give you the WASD prompts.

Dark Souls had its long-anticipated Prepare to Die Edition PC port developed by FromSoftware. The problem: They had never done so in-house before (the earlier port of Ninja Blade had been farmed out to a third-party porting house), and they openly admitted to having significant issues with the port about a month before release. In short, what was released was the Xbox 360 version with very few additional features. The frame rate is locked tightly at 30 FPS, and even then slight framerate lag is notable; the provided keyboard controls are particularly atrocious, designed to have two hands on the keys at all times—having an Xbox 360 pad is a must; mouse control (what there is of it) is skittish, the buttons can't be rebound, the sensitivity can't be adjusted, and the camera vertical range is shorter than if you were using a controller's thumbstick.

The resolution is locked to 1024×720, same as the console versions—even though the game has higher resolution support, running it at 720p or higher simply upscales the image to fit; multiplayer is a crapshoot, with summons failing for unexplained reasons and summon markers popping in and out of the world at random; and despite being sold on Steam with a retail release in Europe and Asia announced, the game still relies on Games For Windows Live for achievements and multiplayer sessions. This reliance on Games for Windows Live has also proven to lead to problematic installations leaving some users unable to even launch the game, let alone experience any gameplay. This could be considered a game-breaking bug but the game doesn't start to begin with for some people. Though as of December 2014, you can now opt into a beta that will make the game run exclusively on Steam, thankfully removing the reliance on Games for Windows Live for multiplayer sessions and getting rid of any quirks related to it.

While Dark Souls II had a rather decent port (minus the poor keyboard controls), the PC port of Dark Souls III carries the torch. Along with the tremendously laggy netcode, the game suffers frequent crashes and very high FPS slowdown even on top hardware. This is even more egregious as the PC version was actually delayed compared to the console version.

DC Universe Online has one egregious issue on Windows: If you're planning to play the game with a gamepad, you'd better have an Xbox 360 controller. Have anything else (like one of those cheap USB DualShock 2-controller look-alikes or even a PlayStation2-to-USB controller adapter)? You may find that the camera is stuck looking up, due to the fact that the right nub is handled differently from Xbox 360 controllers on these controllers. No thanks to the fact that the game does not provide a way to remap controller buttons and axes.

You can still work around that problem with a 360 controller emulator, although since this is an online game it might be seen as a cheating tool. But then you consider the fact that the only other platform the game came out for is the PlayStation 3, whose controller is similar to the DualShock 2 save for the L2 and R2 buttons being pressure-sensitive triggers. Also, if they see gamepads as a cheating tool, wouldn't it be a better idea to not allow gamepads at all (and while at it, force the players of the PS3 version of the game to use a USB mouse and keyboard too?)

A later version of the game attempted to fix this issue. The good news is, these controllers are treated like the DualShock controllers they are and the screen no longer sticks to the floor looking up anymore. The bad news is, it has a minor glitch that fails to read the right nub correctly— the camera now pans in a spiral motion due to being still reliant on XInput and thus not able to see the axis properly. This is fine if your character doesn't have the power of flight. Otherwise you'll find yourself returning to the mouse and keyboard pretty often.

And this was also the case with numerous other games, too, as they now make use of the XInput API. Especially the ones released alongside the Xbox 360 versions.

Dead Rising 2 requires Games for Windows Live on PC. Most Games for Windows Live titles run fine and players who don't care about GFWL see it as a minor annoyance. Dead Rising 2, however, often has problems talking to the GFWL wrapper; it may not even realize it's there, in which case, the most you can do is play the game without saves. And very much like Blur, you can't change the keybindings. Also, if your computer just met the minimum requirements to play the game, you'd be lucky to get 10-15 FPS. Anyone who was playing the game with more... questionable methods reported that they had no such slowdowns on the same hardware. GFWL strikes again. But hey, at least you got achievements!

Sadly the case for Deadly Premonition, which was a particularly lazy port in the first place (lacking graphic options and even controller support for a game originally designed with controllers in mind) with game crashes aplenty and numerous issues with various graphic cards cropping up. Got so bad the lead designer, Hidetaka “Swery65" Suehiro, offered a Backhanded Apology via Twitter. Thankfully, however, the gaming community have come up with fixes and mods in order to make the game playable as it seems an official patch is unlikely at this point.

Disney Infinity 3.0: Other than the game being released on Steam as an Allegedly Free Game with almost $900 worth of DLC at launch (which was rectified immediately after and the total DLC cost was reduced to a more manageable $130), the game is also not kind to lower-end PCs. Unlike most PC games, the latter problem can't be remedied by lowering the texture settings or the resolution (which is locked at 16:9), because the game doesn't even let you do that. This may have played a factor in why support for the PC version of 3.0 was eventually dropped before 3.0 became a Franchise Killer altogether.

Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara was re-released on Steam, and they did try to make Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer a selling point, but the problems with the port were so great that almost nobody wants to mess with it. For one thing, there's no support for local multiplayer and no support for gamepads, but more damningly, the majority of the keybindings are set. You can't change the movement buttons from the arrow keys to WASD, and even if you change the action buttons, you can't change the buttons you use to confirm or cancel on the main menu. Furthermore, the graphics are worse than the graphics from pre-existing arcade emulators, making many wonder why they even bothered with porting it.

Final Fantasy VII had SEVERAL issues when the PC port came out in 1998. The music was all converted into MIDI format (the most jarring result is that One-Winged Angel doesn't have lyrics unless your sound card is from a particular wavetable sound card family—namely, either the SoundBlaster AWE32 or AWE64 line. Egregiously, other wavetable cards like the equally popular Gravis Ultrasound or lesser ones like the Trident 4DWave aren't supported). The pre-rendered cutscenes — which didn't always sync properly with the in-game sprites in sequences where they overlapped — needed a special Windows 95 codec to run (which isn't on the install disc). The game itself had rather high system requirements for something meant for a Windows 95 machine (Windows 98 would be another matter, except the game wasn't made for it). It only gets worse from there: On more modern systems, there are game-code/OS incompatibility issues, crashes (before/after FMVs, on quitting...), speed and graphic artifact/rendering issues, and basically the whole thing is a mess unless you use a handful of fan-created mods. These issues normally wouldn't be held against a game that's over 10 years old, except that as of 2010 it's still being sold in this format as part of the EA Classics line!

The digital re-release in 2012 also has its share of issues. Occasionally, the game doesn't detect saves, several users had trouble with activating the game, and the music is still MIDI-quality, despite being released fourteen years later and space not being an issue. Fortunately, the latter is relatively easy to fix, but it makes one wonder why Square Enix didn't do anything about it.

It also had rare but noticeable problems with certain textures and models. The textures used for the Quake 3 spell may sometimes glitch out and the models for JENOVA Synthesis and Bizzaro Sephiroth may glitch out to the point where you have two models overlapping with each other and when you kill them, only one of the models goes through its proper death animations while the "extra" model is left alone.

The game was also released a year later in July 2013 on Steam, except it's the exact same version as Square Enix's 2012 re release, which includes the low-quality MIDI music and other glitches. It wasn't until October 2013 that the original soundtrack was finally added in a patch.

Final Fantasy VIII ironed out most of the problems with the PC port of the previous game, but there are still two issues: firstly, the game does not work with video cards newer than a Radeon 9000 or GeForce 6800 in hardware acceleration mode, which means most modern hardware. Unlike Final Fantasy VII, there is no fix for the game due to the game's Broken Base. Secondly, like Final Fantasy VII earlier, the game also has unusually high requirements for something meant for a Windows 98 machine (requiring a 233 MHz Pentium MMX with 64 MB of RAM minimum and a 300 MHz Pentium II with 128 MB for optimum performance). The biggest problem was that, like Final Fantasy VII, it's still being sold on store shelves as an EA Classics title, even as of 2010. Most of the problems are corrected with a fan-made launcher, which also allows you to play the game with custom resolutions. Coupled with the fact that the PC port featured much better quality character models, the game ends looking much better than the original, although it still needs a relatively high-end system.

This game, Final Fantasy VII, and Final Fantasy IX all have a major aesthetic flaw; the CG-rendered backgrounds (which make up 95% of the games' areas), very much a selling point of all three games and which have aged fairly well even today on the console versions, were not re-rendered for higher resolutions. They'll still 640×480 (at best), and for VII and VIII, the backgrounds all looked extremely pixelated and lacking in detail on what would be a large monitor at the time of release. Playing them today on a monitor with a much higher native resolution will make the problem exponentially more pronounced. Even IX, which unlike its older brothers didn't have an earlier PC port to draw from, falls prey. It also makes a jarring contrast with the 3D models rendered over them. You might think that Square Enix would at least go through the trouble of implementing a filter to address this issue in the digital releases, but alas....

Square Enix also quietly launched a Steam port of Final Fantasy VIII towards the end of 2013. Aside from the fact that it was launched with absolutely no marketing at all, it still required the user to activate the software with Square Enix like Final Fantasy VII above. And oh, it still used MIDI music and the background graphics are still 640×480. Worst of all is that the cutscenes and videos that play in the background are still at 15 FPS, but the other assets are at 60 FPS, causing certain areas to feel weird.

Final Fantasy XIII has a Steam release that takes up an alarming amount of space (60 gigabytes), has no graphical settings whatsoever, is locked at 720p, has framerate problems on all but very specific hardware setups, barely has rebindable keys at all, and much like the MGS2: Substance port below, pressing Esc exits to desktop while in fullscreen (pressing Esc while windowed brings up a confirmation menu) and you're expected to know this already.

A patch released in October 2014 fixed the "pressing Esc at full screen exits without confirmation" issue, and a patch in December added a scarce few graphics options including custom resolutions, but the other issues remains unresolved.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 has shown to have similar issues Final Fantasy XIII had, only having the graphics options that came with XIII's patch. For some people, it actually runs worse than Final Fantasy XIII.

From Dust shipped with the same maligned DRM scheme as other contemporary Ubisoft PC games even after the developers had previously announced that it wouldn't, deleting and rephrasing their original announcement on the game's own forum. Coupled with minimal visual options (no choice for anti-aliasing or any way to disable the 30 FPS limit on the display) and some baffling performance issues and Game Breaking Bugs (one level is very nearly unwinnable because the tides change much faster than on the console version), the PC release was a public relations disaster for Ubisoft, with Steam giving out refunds to disgruntled players for the first time since Grand Theft Auto IV.

The PC port had one horrible, horrible flaw. Occasionally, your saved games would disappear, never to be seen again. Epic also forgot to renew the certificate on the game's copy protection, leading everyone's copy to declare that the game was pirated and refuse to boot on January 28, 2009. This was fixed just over a week later, on February 6. During that time, only pirated installations of the game could still play!

Because every installation of game is run over the Internet, people eventually ran out of installation codes, making them unable to install game even when they bought it from store (the game will just spew something about the code "exceeding number of uses, please try another one"). Solution? Find any webpage with Halo 2 codes and try them all, one at a time — and checking each code may take several minutes. Good luck, you'll need it.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier had a PC port which was delayed several times, was actually canceled at one point, and finally came out a full month after the 360/PS3 versions. Despite the long development time, it has laziness written all over it. The launch-day problems are so numerous that a necessary list includes but is not limited to:

Limited graphical settings.

Poor, crash-prone performance, even on high-end PCs, sometimes with a nice memory leak to destabilize any system it's installed on for good measure.

There's no way to change settings in-game at all without having to quit to the main menu (resulting in even more agonizing load times). At the very least, this is a problem in the console versions too — its "in-game manual" feature, despite being advertised as "more convenient" than leaving your spot in front of the TV to look things up in the manual, forces you to quit back to the main menu to access it.

If you have a controller plugged in (or in worse cases, simply have its driver installed), then the mouse — which was working perfectly in the menus — refuses to work in-game.

Even if you get the mouse to work in-game, it's handled poorly, especially with additional mouse buttons (or even the mouse wheel button) not working in-game. This is made even worse during the Forced Tutorial early on where it requires you to view through the scope (you cannot even just fire at all until you'd somehow get to do it), which is bound to the aforementioned third mouse button that doesn't work in-game. Coupled with the impossibility of control remapping and you get a port which anyone without a gamepad are rendered incapable of progressing through the first mission.

Instead of fixing any of the mentioned issues with the 1.2 patch, not only was performance actually worse, it forced lower resolutions in the configuration file. And for a decent percentage of its players, with each further patch it somehow kept getting worse — quite an accomplishment given that almost none of the patches for the platforms the game was actually intended for fixed any of the game's issues, either.

XP users who preordered the game were screwed over even worse — until the game had actually been released, there was absolutely no word that the game required Vista or Windows 7 to run (hell, most sites that aren't Steam still listed XP as supported for months on end), leaving the aforementioned users paying at least 50 bucks for a terrible port that they couldn't even play at all. Ubisoft did originally promise a patch that will allow the game to run on Windows XP, but this naturally devolved from "three weeks after release" into nothing but repeatedly broken promises of release after "the next title update" — it took nearly a year since the console versions' release for that to finally come out.

Grandia II has cutscene encoding problems similar to the PS2 version (needlessly duplicated frames, creating the illusion of "hanging" attack cutscenes), badly downsampled and compressed cutscenes (resolution somewhere around 256×192 or similar, with countless artifacts), and on top of that, requires an obscure codec to play them.

Grandia II Anniversary Edition, while more or less decent for a port, has several glaring flaws. The game is full of bugs and glitches, some of which are game breaking, such as Melia's first boss battle being impossible to end due to a looping bug preventing her from performing the attack that's supposed to signal the end of the battle. The music during battles cuts out completely after a single loop. Finally, the much touted addition of the original Japanese audio isn't at all synced with the onscreen text's autoscrolling, which was designed with the English dialogue in mind, meaning many conversations end up being cut off abruptly, making it almost impossible to keep up with the dialogue.

Grand Theft Auto IV, for a good while, had a particularly infamous PC port, not only thanks to noticable performance issues and a clumsy mouse and keyboard interface, but particularly because Rockstar decided to package the game with an extra piece of software known as the Rockstar Social Club, a utility created to handle the game's multiplayer connectivity, which in its original iteration would run on top of the game (along with SecuROM and the infamous Games for Windows Live) and nag you to log into it not only whenever you wanted to play, but on startup as well. The controls can't be changed (a feature that has been standard even in the DOS era). It was so bad that Steam gave out refundsnote To clarify, Steam never gave out refunds before that point. Before they set up a new system in June 2015 where anything could be refunded if it's been owned for less than two weeks and played for less than two hours, they only did so five times including here - twice for other games that were the epitome of this trope like From Dust and Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, and twice for games that were advertised entirely on Blatant Lies like The War Z and the "remake" of Colin McRae Rally (which turned out to be a port of the iOS game). to angry gamers. Since the game's launch in December 2008, many of the game's performance issues have now been ironed out, and Rockstar Social Club has been integrated into the game software itself... almost a year and a half after launch.

Version 1.0.4.0 ran at an acceptable framerate and is generally recommended by most gamers on low-end systems (at the cost of not being able to sign in to multiplayer). This wasn't the case with 1.0.6.0 and 1.0.7.0 — despite Rockstar's claims about the shadow mapping system being "less memory-intensive", it actually accounts for the decreased framerate after updating to the said patches.

Guitar Hero III was touted to be playable on laptops, for the first portable Guitar Hero experience (until the DS version). Too bad that, on some computers, the game chugs down to unplayable speeds, apparently unrelated to the computer's specs. The Copy Protection seems to at least be partially responsible, too. And that's why Frets on Fire exists.

In a bizarre case of a port to the same platform having problems, the Half-Life expansions were rereleased on Steam with the original soundtracks missing and mysteriously replaced with the same tracks from the original game. No explanation was ever made as to why, but apparently it wasn't irreconcilable because Valve finally got around to patching them back in... in 2013, when it was submitted as a bug report on the GitHub they had set up to track bugs with their new Linux ports, and the staffer basically said "Huh. Dunno why that was. Here you go." All was not right with the world, however, as said port somehow broke the ability to actually finishOpposing Force — the player is supposed to be teleported to the finale when the final boss dies, but that didn't happen, and then that had to be remedied.

Compared to the PC port of the first game, the PC version of Halo 2 by Microsoft Games Studios was damn poor. Many keys couldn't be bound to commands because they were pre-reserved by Games for Windows Live functionality (almost a big "screw you" to all non-WASD keymap users), and network connectivity was patchy (another big thank-you for Games for Windows Live). Worst of all, the game could only be played on Windows Vista or higher (and requires workarounds with anything higher since Games for Windows Live is such a pile of ass). There is nothing in the game code that requires Vista to run (unsurprising, since the Xbox used a much older version of DirectX than Vista offers); there's just a small line in the installer that prevents people from installing and running the game on XP. To compound the issue, the "Halo 2 Editing Kit" was extremely gimped. The ability to modify vehicles, weapons, and tons of other functionality were removed, including creating custom tags. This means it's impossible to use the official tools to make new single-player content, and greatly reduces the amount of map modification possible; one of the few reasons why you might prefer the PC version over the Xbox version. Oh, and it's terribly optimised. This port was probably the reason any Halo game past the second (outside the Halo Wars sub-series and the Spartan Assault/Spartan Strike spinoffs) hasn't been ported to PCs since.

Interstate '76'sUpdated Re Release on GOG.com came with a plethora of issues due to the game's update from Windows 95 not being particularly good; the game was originally designed to run on the "Glide" video wrapper (versus DirectX or OpenGL), which was last updated more than a decade ago, while the GOG version runs without any wrapper by default. Technology Marches On causes the game to run in what is essentially turbo mode on modern CPUs to the point where everything from physics to the AI breaks, causing jumps to be impossible, flame weapons to not have the range they're supposed to, and NPC characters driving at 10mph while their wheels spaz out. It's (mostly) playable with a fan-made launcher designed to counter the issues.

L.A. Noire is a lagfest when running the PC port on certain setups with the default multithreaded renderer on. Adding the -str commandline argument on launch cures the problem somewhat, but it still doesn't completely eliminate all the issues from the game, adding to the fact that it was locked at 30 frames per second, citing limitations with the game's facial animation system.

Left 4 Dead 2, specifically the "No Mercy" campaign from the original, which Valve had problems porting. The third map in the campaign has a shutter door that can be opened only from the inside of the building so that any survivors that managed to get yanked outside can go through the door without having to climb up to the rooftop again. While a Tank can bust the door down, survivors were able to do the same thing with melee weapons, allowing them to bypass the crescendo event. It took Valve several patches to fully squash the problem, but the Grenade Launcher can still destroy the door. Thankfully, this is not a problem in Vs. mode since survivors can't carry over weapons from the previous map and the Grenade Launcher never spawns before the event.

The elevator from the fourth map regularly causes players to fall through the floor randomly (can mostly happen if a player goes idle) even today despite several attempts by Valve to fix it. Considering that everything in the first game got fixed very quickly or was not even present, that looks rather pathetic.

There are also issues with the ports of the L4D1 survivors into L4D2.

The character models were directly ported over, so they received no graphical upgrades, which isn't a problem, but they use skeletons/animations from the 'L4D2'' survivors instead of their own. This means Louis is now suddenly taller than he used to be while Zoey seems to have shrunk and often suddenly grows two heads when taking out some of the new weapons. The survivors' hands also clip into the models of the pistols and they don't hold items like pills and bombs properly. On top of this, the survivors also have no lines for the elevator scene in No Mercy and have no reactions when being torn up by a Hunter, despite that there are actual sound files for these events present in the game's files. This makes the port of the old characters look like a rush job.

Originally, The Sacrifice DLC was only going to be for the original Left 4 Dead, but Valve decided at the last minute to give the DLC to Left 4 Dead 2 players as well with No Mercy as a bonus. This caused the porting to be rushed out with almost zero bug testing.

In one of the updates, Zoey (and apparently only Zoey) regained her original animations - and lost ALL of her animations she uses in The Passing as an NPC.

Valve has at least attempted to remedy the survivor dialogue issues regarding Left 4 Dead 2 content such as being attacked by the new special infected and when they use adrenaline shots.

There's also other audio issues related to The Passing -. when it comes to a line from Louis saying "That was for Bill!" after killing a Tank in The passing, the game seems to be unable to differentiate between that campaign, where Louis is an NPC and Bill is dead, and the other campaigns ported from the first game, where Louis and Bill are both playable and likely to be alive.

As part of the Cold Stream DLC, Valve planned to release all of the Left 4 Dead campaigns into Left 4 Dead 2. As with No Mercy, the campaigns had numerous issues when they were released to the PC gaming public as a beta. Nearly all the maps had item density problems, which meant that instead of items spawning randomly by the AI Director, the game wound up spawning items at every single spot that they could appear in. This was fixed over time.

Mafia III ended up being a disaster on the PC, with irate players complaining about the game being locked to 30 fps. On top of that, lower-end systems which are able to run games that are just as graphically intensive as Mafia III are unable to maintain a stable framerate even with the settings turned down to a minimum - forget about playing it on a G3258 or a similar dual-core chip, the game simply goes down to a crawl in city areas, yet in the bayou areas the game seems to run more or less fine. A post-release patch did remove the framerate cap and fixed a number of issues, but there are still some glitches and performance problems that are waiting to be fixed.

The PC port was from the Xbox 360 version. While there were actually gameplay improvements, rumor has it that the game was tested on one graphics card and one sound driver. The released game was exceptionally buggy, with sound effects and background music dropping out and it regularly crashing between the transitions of unskippable cutscenes (which were made unskippable because skipping them crashed the game!). It took over a year and a combination of game and driver patches before the game was stable. It also had rather high system requirements for an Xbox 360 port, although most PCs you can buy or build today will run it fine.

The PC version of the game's first DLC, Bring Down the Sky, was released for free, but for some reason still required a CD-Key. To get the key, one would merely have to register on the Mass Effect website, on a page dedicated to giving out BDtS CD-Keys... a website that stopped existing once the second game was announced. For a long time, players new to the series had to e-mail EA tech support to get a CD-Key for the DLC. Fortunately, they eventually fixed it with a new downloadable file for the DLC that doesn't require a key.

An extremely obscure design feature of some CPUs (not graphics cards) that have come out since the game was released causes the graphics to glitch out in certain areas and make the game near-unplayable. Specifically, the Port 15 section of the Noveria portion of the story campaign used a form of software lighting to take load off the GPU (this was presumably a concession leftover from the Xbox 360 version of the game, where the framerate was already unstable). This used an ancient instruction set known as 3DNow!, which very few games other than Mass Effect used. AMD dropped support for 3DNow! in 2010 and every processor they've made since then (Bulldozer, Jaguar, etc.) does 3DNow! through SSE emulation. This, unfortunately, means that the lighting in the scene is rendered improperly, resulting in characters not being lit at all◊. Of course, pre-2010 AMD processors have native support for 3DNow! and don't require emulation through SSE, so the scene is lit properly. However, even more perplexing is that Intel CPUs never supported 3DNow!, and yet they're subject to the exact same issues — pre-2010 Intel CPUs light the scene properly, post-2010 ones don't.

Mega Man X7 was ported from PlayStation 2 to PC by KOKO Capcom, who did absolutely nothing to properly program the game for PCs and ported it as is. The end result was a shoddy PC port with ugly low-res visuals, jagged polygonal models, and there's no way to fix that. They don't even include an option to exit the game, you have to close the game by Alt+F4 or Task Manager. The kicker? It has some of the most horrendously awkward control scheme for a semi-2D platformer/3D third-person shooter while forcing you to use keys they want to you use and the game does not support gamepads at all! The game even flat-out fails to run on modern Windows operating systems.

The PC version (ported from the Xbox version, which itself was a port of the PS2 original) would have been better had it actually been compatible with anything. To play it, it needs to be patched to hell and back. With fan-made patches. It's worth remembering that the Xbox is really just an Intel PC running a tiny Windows-clone kernel with DirectX drivers for its nVidia GeForce 3 GPU. Breaking the game on almost identical hardware with similarly designed software is a special kind of failure.

Then there were the issue of the controls. The Xbox version at least had support for the shoulder triggers for slow releasing. You had to map extra buttons for "slow" and "weak" if you were using a joypad (and if you were using a keyboard) and- Oh, wait, no more spare buttons on the average pad. Sorry.

With the PC port of MGS1, which was an excellent port, you could pause the game and save without having to call Mei Ling for it. In the PC port of MGS2, you can't do that, you still have to call the save frequency on the codec if you want to record your progress, and pressing Esc doesn't pause your game...it immediately quits it.

Mortal Kombat X had a disastrous launch on Steam. It used a 'streaming installer', which in theory, was supposed to allow you to play the game's content as it came in, instead of waiting for the whole game to install. What actually happened, however, was that on launch, the only assets that were made available was the main menu. The rest of the game didn't even start streaming out until 12 hours after launch. Add to that, you had no control over what assets were installed in what order, and no idea what would be in each pack. So if you wanted to kill time playing single matches with your favorite character, you had to hope he was in one of the first couple of packs, or else you might be waiting a while.

Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee and Stranger's Wrath are horribly unoptimized for the PC, despite being released five years after the original Xbox versions, to the point where people with competent gaming PCs (ones that can run Crysis smoothly at high graphic settings) regularly get less than 30 FPS — and the actual graphics are unchanged. Stranger's Wrath has no visual customization options apart from the resolution settings, ranging from "Low" to "Medium", to "High", and "Ultra", with the latter three being 1024×768, 1280×1024, and 1600×1200, respectively. Both games also have noticable issues with the Xbox 360 controller, which is the default recommended joypad for both: In Munch, the left stick changes the direction that the character faces, but doesn't actually move the character — the arrow keys on the keyboard are apparently still needed for that. In Stranger, the game completely fails to recognize the right thumbstick's button press, which is supposed to toggle the switch between first and third person — a mandatory step in the in-game tutorial. Both games are also ridiculously crash-prone: You'd have to be very lucky to even get to the second stage in Munch, and as of the first week after release, only a third of the playerbase had managed to pass the tutorial in Stranger. And keep in mind, the Xbox itself already has very similar hardware to an IBM-based PC, so you have to be incredibly lazy to botch a port this badly.

Stranger's Wrath is now fixed, as of the 1.1 patch. Performance is nigh-flawless on a Q6600/8800 GT/Windows 7 64-bit system at 1600×1200, like it should be for an Xbox port like this, and you can now select which controller you want and rebind it through an .ini file. Unfortunately, wireless Xbox 360 gamepads are not configured properly by default (which is baffling when the game clearly shows Xbox 360 gamepad controls), and in-game control configuration is still not present. Still, a hell of a lot better than the state it was in at release, and actually quite playable.

[PROTOTYPE] is very picky about what qualifies as "recommended system specifications". It struggles with maintaining a double digit frame rate on the menus, not to mention in actual gameplay. There were also issues with audio sounding exceptionally muffled and other issues. Definitely not one of the best ports out there.

The sequel's port is also plagued with issues. Some systems would run it just fine, others which greatly exceed the listed requirements would somehow result in a chugging mess, and some would just not run at all. One very common syndrome appears to be a memory leak of sorts which would cause the game to degenerate into a slide show. Being a 32-bit program, PCs with at least 4 GB of excess memory to spare (builds with 6 to 8 GB or more) might escape the slowdown even as a ton of memory is consumed, but there are also other game breaking bugs, such as a very early mission refusing to progress unless all CPU cores except for one are disabled for the game (on some machines). Additional problems reported include mouse sensitivity being tied to the frame rate; certain fast performing machines would have the mouse-look go crazy even on minimum sensitivity.

Not only did the Windows port of Quantum Break required the divisive Windows 10 to run due to running Direct X 12, it performed terribly even on very high-end systems, especially with NVIDIA cards. PCs with AMD graphics cards would run the game better, but the performance still isn't great by any stretch. Also, any efforts on part of users to mitigate them were hampered due to how restrictive the Universal Windows Platform, or Games for Windows - Live 2.0 as some would derisively call it, is.

The Windows 95 port of RayForce (Layer Section in other regions) has some glaring problems, some of them have gotten worse over time. The game is played on a 4:3 aspect-ratio but the game screen is crunched to a square box. This results in giving the player less viewing area to anticipate enemies or lock-on to them as efficiently than the arcade and home ports. Effects from the arcade and home versions are also missing. Some tracks of the game don't play at all, such as the Game Over music, and if you don't have the game disc inserted in your CD drive, then the game will not play the music since its all on the disc. The game's frame-rate is also unstable and runs at an unplayable speed, but the .dll files on the disc can fix this issue. The game forces fullscreen mode and its scaling doesn't work properly on newer Windows operating systems, resulting in a smaller game screen despite running in 640×480, and the only way around this through third-party DirectX wrappers such as DXGL.

Red Faction: Guerrilla would run far too fast on Windows 7 computers (which rather quickly replaced Vista as the go-to modern Microsoft OS), forcing the player to use a third party hacking program to slow down the game's refresh rate. Furthermore, the game carries an infamous bug where Games for Windows Live informs the player that a patch is available and is mandatory for online gameplay (even if the game itself is already up to date). Every time without fail, should the player accept the patch download, the game's framerate is reduced to a crawl (in the main menu, mind you) and eventually freezes. Even Volition's release of a manual patch to fix this didn't work for many, making online multiplayer completely unplayable. This was eventually fixed with a late 2014 Updated Re-release as the "Steam Edition", removing the GFWL requirement in favor of Steamworks, along with various other fixes and upgrades.

Resident Evil 4 was touted to feature GameCube-quality graphics with the extra content of the PS2 version, something that wouldn't happen until the Wii version. Instead, SourceNext (whom Capcom commissioned to develop the PC version, along with the PC ports of Onimusha 3 and Devil May Cry 3) ported the PS2 version of the game as it was, with grainy pre-rendered cutscenes and all, but without the shading and lighting, meaning every environment in the game was lit at 100% brightness with no shadows, thus no atmosphere, and had to have that patched (note that this was the only patch the game received). The game's controls were gimped to boot, to the point where the game could be played on a keyboard and only the keyboard, without mouselook like most PC shooters. Quick-time events were near-impossible to complete if you weren't using a gamepad, because the button prompts were limited to "button 3" and "button 4" instead of the actual keys on the keyboard, and to add insult to injury, they accidentally switched the icons for button 3 and button 4 around, so following the on-screen prompts would actually get you killed. For added irony: The same company also released improved (and Japanese-only) PC-DVD ports of Resident Evil 2 and 3 that are fully capable of running on modern Windows operating systems (Windows XP and above) no problem. Fortunately, the devoted mod community of the PC version of Resident Evil 4 has not only patched all these but released mods that up the graphics above and beyond any other version of the game, give the game proper mouse aiming, and change the quick-time event prompts to match up with most commonly used gamepads such as the Xbox 360 one.

The Ultimate HD version released on Steam in 2014, while obviously way better than the older one, also has several problems. Not all the new textures are truly in high definition, so if you select the new set the result is uneven. It misses some graphical effects that were already missing in the Xbox 360 port (which this version is based on), but a modder managed to put them back in within a few hours. Gradients and lighting are not set up well, so compared to the Nintendo and Xbox 360 versions, you get excessive dithering and blinding lens flares. Mouse calibration is imperfect, and only the bare minimum of keys are rebindable from the Options menu; to rebind keys such as the ones used in quick-time events (X+C by default), it requires going to the .ini files editing settings from there, with little-to-no help on rebinding other keys on the keyboard, and some keys cannot be remapped at all. Fortunately, both the porting team and fans are working to fix everything.

Saints Row 2 was so bad that Volition fired the outside company who made the port and essentially washed their hands of it, declaring it hopeless. The on-foot sequences basically worked, but driving was essentially impossible thanks to an internal game clock that did not know how to adapt for CPU speeds other than 3.2 GHz, which is the clockspeed of the Xbox 360 the game was originally developed for. Thankfully the game has a fantastic community that has not only brought the game back to its intended speed and fixed thousands of other bugs, and added plenty of neat content to boot. You can check it out here. With the fan patch, it still isn't perfect, but it's far more playable.

The one thing that can't be fixed is the sound; the company in charge of the PC port didn't have the budget to license the sound middleware, so they used the trial version which downgrades sound to cassette quality and mono sound. Even worse, since the sound files and the interpreter for the middleware are separate files, a patch to fix it would be 10 MB tops, and wouldn't even require re-licensing the music or voice work, since it's not those files being fixed! Luckily, there's a fan-made patch that fixes the radio back to it's intended high quality sound from the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions.

The Steam release of the PC version also displays a bizarre issue where, unless both the client and the game are installed to the C: drive, the game will run, but only show the opening titles and not progress past the loading screen that comes immediately afterwards, which would ordinarily lead to the main menu. Oddly enough, years later the Steam release of Saints Row IV, a vastly superior port, would suffer from the same issue.

Shadowrun was a port of the Xbox 360 game released around the same time as the above Halo 2, also required Windows Vista just to install, and again only checked a single line of code. Especially egregious as the game was released prior to Vista Service Pack 1, when the OS was still ridiculously buggy and expensive, and was multiplayer-only. This and the advantage keyboard and mouse controls gave PC players over 360 players ended up killing the idea of cross-platform multiplayer that was touted as one of its main features - it's been almost a full decade before anyone started trying again, and even then it's almost entirely limited to indie devs.

The game has what appears to be a horrible, horrible memory leak in the GameTap version. After about 40 minutes of play, almost like clockwork, the game will slow to an absolute crawl. You will take a step, wait five minutes, and then be able to take another step. Seriously. This even applies when bringing up menus, so that if you don't save and quit immediately after the effect starts, it can take nearly thirty minutes to quit the game!

Silent Hill 2 has other problems on the PC. On Radeon 9000 series graphic cards (which were the ones produced by ATI when the game was released and were very common), the flashlight doesn't work; turning it on means watching many textures disappear, making it harder to see. The solution could be downgrading to older drivers or adding some lines to a file dedicated to graphic devices, which are equivalent to a hack, for getting what should be a normal feature. In another glitch, you could get CG movies that play all in an acid green and violet palette (and no way around it), and out-of-sync speech during some scripted sequences. There was also the "skipping music" glitch, although there was a patch to fix this — but that patch did not fix anything. Unpacking the patch executable reveals exactly nothing. The entirety of the patch's size is its own .exe.

Silent Hill: Homecoming features a lot of random crashing on the PC. A lot worse when it will always happen if you simply want to change the resolution. Want to play it with a gamepad? Good luck because like the Silent Hill town itself, it has a mind of its own. Finally, there's the out of sync cutscenes.

Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure received a hasty port to the PC. The options menu does not allow you to change any graphics settings. The worse problem however, is, that sound often completely cuts out at certain pre-rendered cutscenes, and to make it worse, there was no subtitles feature for these scenes, so you end up with Eon simply mouthing at you or Kaos and Glumshanks mouthing at each other with the player having no idea what's going on. There were also random crashes at various places, such as the beach levels. Possibly due to this, the sequel, Skylanders: Giants, had its PC version cancelled, and none of the rest of the sequels were announced for the PC.

Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is most stripped down on the PC, in that it has no exclusive characters, no support for the Metal Sonic/Death Egg DLC, and most damning of all, no online multiplayer. In comparison, the Wii version had an exclusive character and had online prior to Nintendo deactivating their original Wi-Fi service, the PS3 version had DLC and online, and the Xbox 360 version had all three. Thankfully, they learned from this for the PC port of Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, which has online, DLC support, and exclusive characters from Team Fortress 2.

The 2004 Sonic Adventure DX port has grainy graphics. The sprites for the HUD indicators, options, etc. look like they were resized with Microsoft Paint, when windowed it uses a window size that makes the graphics look badly stretched horizontally (and no, the window cannot be manually resized to correct this), it always uses the same window size when windowed regardless of resolution selected, it has scaling problems, as the huds, level cards, menus and character select screen don't scale up when you set a higher resolution, making them look really small on the highest resolutions, the game crashes if the player is running it in full screen mode and switches to another window, keys cannot be configured, and it added poorly implemented mouse controls (though they're thankfully optional). The Chao feature was downgraded: party race and Chao transfer were removed, and there's no way of getting Jewel Chao anymore sans hacking, despite them still existing in the game. There is no widescreen support. Lastly, the game has some graphical issues so blatant that it makes you wonder if the porting team even cared.

The game was re-released on Steam in 2010. This release was based on the Xbox 360 port and addressed many of the problems of the 2004 version. Unfortunately, it also introduced a few new problems of its own, such as the game's launcher failing to save your settings, or the game not displaying well on resolutions higher than 720p. (This also happens in three other 2010 re-releases of Sega Dreamcast games: Space Channel 5: Part 2 — which has its own problems, mentioned below —, Sega Bass Fishing, and Crazy Taxi.) The graphics look like they were rendered at a low resolution and upscaled using a filter, rather than rendered natively (most likely Sega's workaround for the scaling issues, as this version was based on the 2004 port), the game still runs on a pillar-boxed 4:3 aspect-ratio if you're playing in widescreen, keyboard controls still can't be reconfigured, and the highest resolution result in a letterboxed screen (most likely to hide avoid blurring the screen too much as a result of the upscaling filter). Lastly, two-tone Chao were unexplainably removed, and the Chao system still suffers from the downgrades of the 2004 port. A patch was released in 2014 that fixes the issues with the controls (controls can be reconfigured and controller support was added), the launcher failing to save your settings, better support for higher resolutions, V-Sync, and FXAA.

The resolution problems the 2010 Steam port of Sonic Adventure DX had were also repeated in the Steam releases of Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episodes I & II as well—the game's native resolution for both titles was always fixed at 1280x720p, and when the user selected a higher or lower resolution, the game's native resolution was actually upscaled or downscaled to the set resolution, rather than rendering the game at the set resolution. It was especially bad in the case of these titles as unlike the SA:DX 2010 port, both games were made with HD resolutions and graphics in mind (the PS3 and 360 versions of these games can run at 1080p with no issue), and they even lacked anti-aliasing options, resulting in the games looking like a very jaggy mess of graphics. It came to a head when the complaints concerning the resolution problems in Episode IIwere raised in the official Sega Forums when the game was released, upon which the PR manager for the game claimed that a fix to allow the game to be properly display the game at different resolutions would not possible due to the image "breaking down" if forced to a higher resolution. Within hours of that statement, a fan made and presented a patch that showed that not only could the game be run at a higher resolution than its intended native resolution, the result looked much better than the original upscaling method. And all he did was change a single line of code in order to do it. Another fan similarly made their own patch that allowed the game to support anti-aliasing features based on the user's local graphics cards. Needless to say, an official patch for Episode II was soon released that addressed the former issue not long afterwards.

While the PC port of Sonic Lost World runs fine on sufficiently powerful hardware, it still commits one of the cardinal sins of porting to the PC, which is that the actual speed of the game is still tied to the framerate.note Using frames as a measure of time makes programming so much easier on consoles. This means that if the framerate ever dips below 60 FPS, the gameplay itself will slowdown, not just the rate at which the graphics render, making slowdown much more noticable. This is rather lacking in comparison to the Polished Port its predecessor received.

Sonic R also dropped the transparency effects on the final tracks, but made up for it by adding variable weather conditions. Certain versions didn't even come with the music!

Space Channel 5 Part 2 has gorgeous graphics on the PC, but the music often goes out of synch, making the game absolutely unplayable unless you edit a few settings to fix itnote turning on triple buffer and Vertical Sync in your graphic card's settings.

Splinter Cell: Conviction is sadly brought down by Ubisoft's new Copy Protection system. If either you or Ubisoft's Internet connection is anything less than perfect for more than a single second, you are automatically kicked out of the game, and must return to the previous checkpoint upon recovery. As always with copy protection, the pirates had it cracked within - well, okay, it took a month, but the method should patch through to crack every future Ubisoft game using the same tech within a day or two. It also had an issue that affected players who installed the game on anything other than the C: drive. Launching the game from that location would result in just a black screen, while the sound played as normal. Apparently Ubisoft didn't foresee this kind of situation.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent had a PC version that, while technically not a port, was clearly based on the Xbox 360 version. Considering that the game is based on the Unreal engine, that Ubisoft had released plenty of PC games before (including every other Splinter Cell game before then, no less, with no issues inherent to the games themselves), and that it's a pretty high-profile game, you'd think it would go fairly smoothly. Wrong. There are so many problems with this port that a list is necessary.

The menus are a confusing mess, and you can't use the mouse on the in-game "laptop" menus; you need to stupidly press the keys mapped to "use" and "crouch". This wasn't a problem in earlier Splinter Cell PC games.

The saved games are arranged in what appears to be completely random order. Not alphabetical, not by mission, not by date or time. Also, checkpoints occasionally overwrite saved games and vice-versa.

There is no gamepad support except for the Xbox 360 Gamepad for Windows. This isn't new to the Splinter Cell PC series, and it uses the traditional mouse-wheel-driven "acceleration" scheme to compensate for the lack of an analog stick. This causes problems, however: the new safe-cracking sequences are affected by the analog stick in a way Ubisoft apparently didn't foresee, and so if you sneak up to a safe at minimum acceleration (the best way to sneak, obviously) on the PC version and try to crack it, you're inexplicably unable to do anything with the safe until you scroll the mouse wheel back up to "re-accelerate". Again, this wasn't a problem with the similar lockpicking sequences in earlier Splinter Cell PC games, or even in this game.

The game supports a pathetically low selection of resolutions, not even including full HD or 16:10 resolutions. This is remedied by editing the game's .ini file. Ubisoft's entire team of programmers apparently couldn't figure this out.

Some allege that the PC version is prohibited from maximum graphical detail to make the 360 version appear better, as editing the .ini files can also result in improved graphics. Until a patch, it was not even possible to enable anti-aliasing (mind you, that's all that patch did).

The "Kinshasa, Part 2" mission is almost guaranteed to crash every time you load a saved game, so you'd better be good at it.

The game would even freeze for no evident reason when viewing some of the training videos for the Versus multiplayer.

The first two Splinter Cell games eventually became this. They were directly ported from the original Xbox versions, and as such were optimised for a number of Nvidia and ATI cards that supported a form of shadow mapping called "shadow buffers", first supported on the GeForce 3 and the NV2A GPU used on the console. While it did work on most hardware at the time, later graphics cards, driver versions and DirectX APIs broke functionality for the said buffers, causing spotlights and other projected shadows to no longer work. As shadows are a key gameplay element, playing the original Splinter Cell and Pandora Tomorrow would be nigh impossible on modern hardware. Splinter Cell 1 did have a fallback mode for ATI video cards and other systems that are incapable of rendering shadow buffers, but Pandora Tomorrow lacks it, which may have accounted for why the latter is unavailable on Steam. There is a fan-made fix for that game, though.

Star Trek: Legacy lags badly on the lowest settings even on the menu screen, even with a good graphics card. None of the controls can be remapped — in fact, there isn't even an in-game guide to the controls. This is horrible because the default control set up forces an egregious use of the mouse in situations where buttons should be (and in the 360 version, were) used.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed had a long-awaited/delayed Windows version that was inexplicably over 30 gigabytes, and has very few options for scaling the game down. It runs fine on a fairly decent rig, but there are no options to tone down the graphics for older machines. The game isn't very well optimized, so while a decent computer will run it with few problems, a mid-range system will choke. The keyboard and mouse controls are also extremely clunky and cumbersome, and the only gamepad supported is the Xbox 360 controller.

The game did allow you to rebind the keyboard and mouse controls, so you could pick a setup that was more logical. However, the game wouldn't update the on-screen prompts for quicktime events from the default bindings. Good luck trying to remember what you rebound 'F' to before you die.

Tales of Symphonia: The PC port on Steam has the internal resolution locked at 720p, the framerate locked at 30fps (when the Gamecube version released over a decade ago ran at 60fps), the game crashes often or doesn't start, lagged at the options, config and save menus, has new typos, has the wrong fonts and broken or missing text when selecting languages other than English, and had incorrect button displays for the controls showing PlayStation 3 prompts. The port also had additional VMProtect DRM software and had only six save slots on launch, though some of these problems were patched out and VMProtect was removed entirely while the latter has been fixed.

Toukiden: Kiwami's PC port has been met with heavy backlash. Video options are sparse (e.g. cannot go beyond 1080p, no 16:10 resolutions) and does little to make the game look any better. The game is locked at 30 FPS, and if you try to unlock the frame-rate, the game becomes unplayable as the animations and physics are tied to the frame-rate which results in the game running faster than it should, nor does its Steam page warns customers about this. The game is poorly optimized with demanding system requirements (an i7 for both minimum and recommended) and will sometimes slow down in certain areas even if your machine meets the recommended system requirements. Certain video cards and Windows 8/8.1 combinations cannot run the game at all and crashes if you try to play it. Keyboard controls are poorly implemented, using the mouse will sometimes freeze the game when there's no mouse support at all, and despite recommending a gamepad and uses Xbox 360 prompts, only a few are supported and analog sticks doesn't work properly.

Although not quite as bad as the aforementioned Game Boy port of Toy Story, the Windows 95 port still is far outclassed by the SNES and Genesis versions. On top of already missing many of the graphical effects and the level "Really Inside the Claw Machine", the controls are heavily mangled from the console versions, with Woody's jumping being much more floaty and less realistic than the console counterparts. His whip also has extremely strict collision detection, making it very hard to actually aim at enemies and adding a ton of Fake Difficulty to an already Nintendo Hard game, and making the bosses nearly unplayable. By far, though, the biggest offender has to go to the RC stages — they were already notorious enough for being difficult due to being hard to control in the console versions, but they are outright unplayable in the PC port, with the controls being so overly sensitive that it's impossible to aim at anything. It does get a red book soundtrack on the plus side, but that's far from enough reason to pull it out of this territory.

Virtual-ON: Operation Moongate was a decent port but it unfortunately became this over time due to a horrible game-breaking bug where the game crushes after getting a Game Over with any Virtuaroid other than Fei-Yen for some reason and ending a match on Versus Mode due compatibility issues on Windows Vista and later.

Viva Pińata has a PC version notorious for slowness and occasional crashes. The worst part of the game is that the coveted Chewnicorn, the game's rare Unicorn Piñata, is colored incorrectly and, due to a lighting glitch, glows black every three seconds.

Watch_Dogs was purposely made to run on nVidia hardware, and nVidia hardware onlynote The 8th-gen console versions were optimized for AMD hardware since that's what they have. If you don't have nVidia hardware, then you're screwed. You will experience framerate drops and crashing/freezing galore, even if you have a computer that can run games on their highest setting flawlessly. Also, the game requires the use of UPlay regardless of where you buy it from. Another problem is that modders found that the coding for the absolutely amazing graphics configuration settings shown in the E3 demo were in the game and performed absolutely fine if they were added back into the game, leading to backlash and widespread allegations that the quality was tuned down so PCs didn't overtake the Xbox One and PS4 in graphics fidelity.

Wipeout 2097 lacks a speed limiter in PC versions, causing the game to run out of control on top of the line PCs back in '97, never mind today (this can be fixed with a CPU-killer program, but then you will find out the hard way that Windows Vista/7 require a lot more CPU to run properly than the game!). The game also has a different soundtrack that's nowhere near as good as the original's.

It's ultimately generous of Blizzard release several of their old games for free on Windows, but the Rock 'n' Roll Racing release was a major mess up, period. The classic songs were removed and replaced with a generic grunge metal soundtrack, and to make things worse, it was actually the SNES version of the game patched to disable the songs and then run on a modified emulator that also provided the grunge soundtrack on it's ownnote loading the ROM into a proper emulator resulted in the game missing it's music, but sound effects are intact. This also meant that the game had one long soundtrack that doesn't change through the game and gets annoying quickly enough. One wonders that if they can't even convince the right holders of the songs to let them distribute their chiptune versions of the songs with their game(it's not even the real songs, just chiptune covers that they made themselves!), why even bother?

Homefront: The Revolution had many bugs and performance issues on all platforms at launch. The PC version was no exception with constant framerate drops.

Macintosh (Mac)

Heroes of Might and Magic IV had its AI lobotomized at some point during the porting process from the PC, and the computer would send out one day's worth of troops to try to kill a horde of mid-to-high level monsters. This was somewhat amusing in maps where you weren't tasked with the defeat of a specific hero, but when you were... well, you just had to hope that said hero wasn't allowed to move from his starting position, because you didn't get credit for the kill if you weren't involved in the fight.

Mafia II, ported by Feral Interactive was just as disastrous as the PlayStation 3 version, not because of the lack of grass and blood but because it was ill-optimised compared to the PC version, churning out 15-20 fps even on a reasonably powerful Macintosh.

SimCity 3000 was not made in-house by Maxis, and its quality reflects this. It was ported by a Ukrainian company which left the entire PC interface (such as the file hierarchy system) intact, all while leaving out other features (such as the Building Architect Tool).

SimCity 4 was also outsourced and was released months after the PC version. It was terribly slow to the point of unplayability, left off the official tools that PC users got, and exhibited behaviors that PC gamers would only get if they had a plug-in conflict. In fact, for owners of Intel-based Macs, running the Windows version via a compatibility layer such as Wine or Crossover Games is preferable in every way.

The OS X version of The Pinball Arcade was apparently a direct port from the iPad version. This means it has an interface meant for touch screens for a keyboard instead, as well as the iPad's resolution. While some of the issues (but not all) have been fixed, a few specific tables would also exhibit strange behavior—for instance, if one App Store review is to be believed, the ball will occasionally fly right off the White Water table, never to return.

Amiga

Smash TV has badly redrawn graphics, nearly all of the music cut out of the game, and horribly muffled sound effects.

Test Drive didn't do justice to the Amiga's graphical capabilities, had the engines sounding more like 8-bit jets than cars, and there are few other sound effects to speak of. By comparison, the technologically less advanced Commodore 64 managed to pull it off a lot better. As with Defender of the Crown, the inferiority of the Amiga version is likely attributable to inexperience and ludicrous deadlines.

Sierra's Amiga ports of its classic games were notorious for failing to take advantage of the machine's graphics and sound capabilities.

Disastrous versions of multi-platform releases:

Consoles

The Wii and Wii U versions of Angry Birds Trilogy were developed later than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions. While the latter versions at least change up the presentation quite a bit, the Wii and Wii U versions have no such effort, looking more like the mobile versions (complete with the pigs still having their outdated character design). The Wii U is an HD console, so in all likelihood the devs could have just ported over the graphics from the PS3 or 360 versions. For whatever reason, they chose not to.

Congo Bongo had bad graphics or missing levels in all ports. As the game is presented in 3/4 isometric perspective, it was actually put on consoles that could not handle that view such as the Atari 2600. The sole exception was the SG-1000 conversion handled by Sega themselves, which ditched the isometric perspective completely in favor of a semi top-down view.

Donkey Kong was screwed up horribly in some way in most ports (excluding Donkey Kong '94, which is more of a remake), ranging from awful controls, to completely messed up graphics and music, to even cutting out the cement factory or elevator stages (or both). Thesevideos show several different versions of the game. One of them is the NES version, and another is a graphics hack of the NES version, both of which are very good despite lacking the cement factory stage — and even that was re-added to a limited rerelease during the '10s. The rest? They all suck horribly, though special mention goes to the ZX Spectrum version, which is especially bad. When the Intellivision version was released, people at Mattel suspected it to be an act of sabotage on the part of Coleco.

While the SNES version is indeed a marvelous achievement, the pros are far outweighed by the cons. The graphics of the original were greatly downgraded; enemies are no longer gibbed when suffering from close-range explosions, many textures have been simplified or removed outright (and enemy sprites, leading the infamous "crab-walking" baddies that always faced you), the framerate is rather uneven, and the frames can even skip some sprite animations if more than three enemies are on-screen at close-range. The lighting was also significantly altered, making certain lit walls where secrets are hidden like any other wall, which can cause frustration if you're trying to remember which freaking panel that upgrade was put behind. To make it worse, they even had the gall to add Easy-Mode Mockery; if you're playing the easy difficulty levels, it only lets you play the first episode, Knee-Deep in the Dead. If you want to play the third episode Inferno and see the Final Boss, you were forced to play on Ultra-Violence or Nightmare!, the two hardest difficulties. The Super Famicom version fixes this.

The sound effects are muffled as well, a good portion of the levels have been excised, and it's impossible to turn and sidestep at the same time—something that even the SNES port of Wolfenstein 3D could manage. The only truly good part of the game is its soundtrack, which is fun to listen to because the SNES's sampler makes the MIDI soundtrack sound much more like real instruments than the Sound Blaster's FM synth ever couldnote Unless you cut your teeth with the PC version of Doom on a PC with a Gravis Ultrasound, then the SNES version sounds absolutely muffled compared to the glory that is the Ultrasound. Because, like the SNES' SPC700, the Ultrasound was a sampler-based sound card, which Doom had full support for and would load its own custom soundfonts if one is used, and unlike the SNES' SPC700, it had at leastfour times the amount of memory compared to the SPC700 (256kb upgradable to 1MB, vs 64kb). And the AWE32 (another sampler-based card) ain't too far behind either..

The Sega 32X port was inexplicably inferior to the SNES version despite being on a superior hardware. Despite the graphics being better, the entire third episode was missing along with the bosses and BFG-9000, beating the game would load up a DOS prompt if the player cheated or used the level select and the soundtrack was butchered. Especially unforgivable because the FM chip in the Genesisnote the YM2612; the 32X uses 2 PWM channels is very similar to the YM2608 (the FM chip used on later versions of the PC88 and PC98), and it even has an additional PSG chip for sound effects.

Art Data Interactive's port on the 3DO. Small screen and low frame-rate ahoy! When put next to Interplay's port of Wolfenstein 3D on the same console, this is inexcusable. The single bright spot, picked up on pretty much every review, was the awesome music, rerecorded specifically for this version. Just a shame that there were so few levels that some of the original songs were not present. The port was frequently rumoured to have been accidentally mastered from an earlier build, but as it turns out, it was programmed by one person in ten weeks.

The American Sega Saturn port is an absolute mess. Jerky, unresponsive controls are mapped to a decidedly questionable control scheme. There are completely random bouts of slowdown — it sometimes happens when looking at a blank wall! Supposedly, this is because John Carmack was very strict about not allowing them to use hardware rendering due to texture warping, although few would argue that unplayable lag is the better option. The non-musical sound effects are of low quality. And there is no multiplayer, which takes half the fun out of Doom. It's been compared to the 32X port in quality, and the Saturn has more advanced specs than the 32X. The Japanese version, on the other hand, fared much better although both versions lacked the colored lighting the PlayStation version had.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars on Xbox 360 and PS3 had badly downgraded graphics, missing features (including permanent stat growth, one of the main feature of the original version), was limited to 16 players instead of 32 and had ridiculously strong auto-aim. At least one ID Software employee called it a textbook example of how not to port a game.

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy was ported to the Xbox from the PS2 version and gained some new features (such as the ability to store powerups and use them later), but also gained new glitches. The GameCube version was even worse, having glitches, slowdown, and missing health meters on bosses, though a later release fixed these.

Lichdom Battlemage on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One has two huge problems: atrocious performance, with the game always staying between 10-20 frames per second, and atrocious loading times, clocking in at several minutes, while having the audacity of still needing to stream in textures afterwards. But on the bright side, a patch was later released, showing astronomical improvements in performance over the earlier build. The Xbox One version stays at a near constant 30FPS with vertical sync. However, the PlayStation 4 version has an unlocked framerate up to 60FPS, making it inconsistent but still playable, especially compared to the stock version. The only sacrifice made was a drop from a native 1080p to 900p on both consoles.

The Lion King for the NES was a disaster, with sluggish and unresponsive controls, physics and jumping mechanics that are broken beyond belief, and short levels (the game can be completed in under 20 minutes) which are presented without any kind of story context. On top of that, the game only covers the young Simba levels from the 16-bit games, meaning that not only do you not play as the eponymous Lion King, but the film's villain Scar is completely absent from gameplay (outside of the Easy-Mode Mockery ending screen). What's sad about this port is even the bootleg port created by Super Game is superior to it both gameplay-wise and aesthetically (musically as well, since all of Super Game's ports are done with the Konami sound engine) and even resembles the original game more. North American and Japanese gamers were at least spared from seeing this exist in their region, as it was only released in PAL territories. There's evidence pointing towards this port being an unfinished release, as the Game Boy version of the game manages to include every level from its 16-bit counterparts except Be Prepared while polishing up some of the rough spots.

The Microsoft Windows port was cited by some to have been the reason why game developers initially stuck to MS-DOS, and as one of the reasons for DirectX's inception. The game used WinG, a graphics backend library Microsoft developed in an attempt to address issues with game development on Windows, as the latter operating system added unnecessary overhead and did not allow for close-to-metal access to hardware unlike DOS. While the Windows port did work to an extent, it caused quite a PR disaster when millions of Compaq Presarios came shipped with incompatible graphics drivers, leading to BSODs, tantrums among children, and thus disgruntled parents.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 was a completely different game on the the Xbox, PC, and GameCube, all designed by a different development house from the PlayStation 2 version. While there are some track similarities, the sense of speed is all but gone, the handling is worse, the game in general is far more boring, and the menus don't look as nice. These versions of the game aren't "bad", per se (as games they're fundamentally sound and could even be fun if you didn't ever get to play the "good" one), but they are considerably inferior to the PlayStation 2 version.

Revolution X. Half of the reason for its checkered reputation comes from its abysmal SNES and Genesis ports, which are better-known than the original coin-op light gun game.note The other half is because of its sheer absurdity, but that's not for this page. The arcade game had digitized graphics of higher resolution than what those two consoles could handle (here's a comparison) and actual Aerosmith songs for BGM. Also, the ports lacked support for the consoles' respective light gun controllers for no reason whatsoever.

While Rise of the Robots is abysmal on any console, some ports managed to make it even worse. The two only elements of the game that people generally agree are good are a well-done techno soundtrack (and depending on which port you're playing, an alternate soundtrack by Queen's Brian May) and very fluid pre-rendered graphics. While the Genesis and SNES ports had lower quality music, the Amiga and MS-DOS port had no music at all, the Game Gear port completely tanked all of the game's only redeeming qualities, with understandably the worst graphics and musical quality of them all, while somehow managing to play even worse than the other ports (it's stuck on permanent hard mode, which in the other ports meant that the game resorted to blatant cheating and button-reading to win).

SimCity 2000 has the same issues in every single console version. Control responsiveness is unbelievably bad, and for something that stores data on flash or battery-backed RAM instead of magnetic media, the save game loading times are incredibly slow. Also, looking for help? You're instructed to press shift + enter!

The remastering of Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, was outsourced to Hijinx Studios, a mobile/handheld game developer that had never done a console game before, using source code from the unfinished betas of both games due to poor archiving. It shows, with both games suffering from many bugs major and minor and overall being noticeably worse than the originals on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. There is rampant slowdown to the point of rendering the games (particularly SH3) virtually unplayable, the voices fall out of sync with the characters' lips, poor lighting makes navigation almost impossible in some parts, some of the texture work looks unfinished and recycled from the original versions (clashing badly with the redone sections), and most damningly, SH2's famous fog effects are so broken as to render certain parts of the game laughable. What makes that all even worse is that source code is not even required to produce an HD version of a PS2 game. All you need is a retail copy, and a team of programmers savvy in the PS2 language. It was how the HD versions of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus were made. Thankfully, Konami patched the PS3 version, and SH2 works pretty well now with minor issues. (They mostly fixed the fog effect, though it's still somewhat less impressive than the original.) Xbox 360 owners, however, were screwed as they didn't get that patch. All told, the Internet Backdraft from the whole debacle was so bad that many Silent Hill fans boycotted the collection out of spite.

And all of that doesn't even get into the creative decisions, the biggest one being that both games came with redone voice acting that quickly proved controversial among fans of the series. In SH3, for instance, the teenage protagonist Heather suffered a dramatic case of Dawson Casting, sounding like a forty-year-old woman imitating a teenage girl. (Comparisons between the originals and the remasters can be seen here and here.) Fortunately, with SH2 the original voice track is still available as an option, but because Konami couldn't clear all the original voice actors for SH3 in time for release (the VA for Heather turned out to be working in China and the VA for Douglas died just before the original game was released), only the new voice track is available in that game.

Starfighter 3000, the Saturn and PlayStation ports of the 3DO game Starfighter, has terrible draw distance and less graphical detail than the original, quite baffling considering how much weaker the 3DO is. The original version made heavy use of the 3DO's ARM RISC processors, but even there the port could have turned out much better than it did. The Saturn version is especially bad.

Ports by High Voltage Studios:

Zone of the Enders HD Collection had its problems on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but the former got the raw end of the stick, even more so with The 2nd Runner. It had very inconsistent frame-rate issues that were never present in the PlayStation 2 originals (at most it ran only about 30 FPS) and visual effects went missing, all of which is inexcusable running on superior hardware. As it turns out, Konami hired High Voltage Studios to handle the porting job rather than doing it in-house or hiring Bluepoint, the studio that handled the HD ports of the Metal Gear Solid games. And to put icing on the cake, due to the negative reception the Zone of the Enders HD Collection received, Ender's Project has been put off indefinitely and the dev team dismantled as a result. Thankfully they worked on a patch with Hexa Drive, the same team behind the HD port of Ōkami, for the PlayStation 3 roughly a year later that inverts this trope, running in full 1080p with much smoother frame-rate. Unfortunately, like the Silent Hill HD Collection, Xbox 360 owners were screwed over AGAIN as the patch was released only for PlayStation 3.

The studio has been responsible for a number of other terrible ports since then: Mortal Kombat 9, Injustice: Gods Among Us and Mortal Kombat X were all optimisation disasters. Their PlayStation 4 and Xbox One ports of Saints Row IV were missing several effects and possessed a janky frame rate. Their PlayStation 4 port of Injustice, however, left the game completely intact with no noted issues.

All three console versions of the game Batman: Arkham Origins suffer from some form of issues. Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions suffer from some nasty Game-Breaking Bugs that apparently Warner Bros. simply has no interest in patching, which involves the game randomly crashing when trying to enter certain areas, along with both versions having a somewhat inconsistent framerate. The 360 arguably got hit the worst though as it suffers from even more freezing issues, occasional black screens, and even save data corruption. The Wii U version seemed to not be hit as hard, as its main issues mainly just involve a somewhat choppy framerate like the other versions, and the gamepad features feel a bit bare bones compared to the Wii U port of Batman: Arkham City (likely the result of the Wii U version being handled by Human Head Studios, the people behind Prey (2006), instead of the game's primary developer, WB Montreal, who were the studio behind the Wii U port of Arkham City in the first place), but otherwise the Wii U game actually seems better by comparison due to higher quality graphics and much less game-breaking bugs.

While not a "disaster" in the "this utterly shames the original product" sense, Primal Rage has a unique issue: It cannot be ported correctly. The original game has a very strange encryption scheme and it's never been decoded and all related parties who created it have never been willing to help out with breaking it. So all the ports are based on code that has been DRM'd by this encryption, resulting in various glitches, missing effects (such as blood color) and being unable to perform certain combos and fatalities properly.

The "HD Remasters" of [PROTOTYPE] and [PROTOTYPE 2] for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which were uneventfully churned out by Activision, actually run worse than their PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 counterparts. Seeing how the games run worse on more powerful hardware is inexcusable and it shows that these are just lazy ports rather than actual remasters.

Saints Row IV is a trainwreck on every console. Occasional lag refusing to blow up cars one by one on Veteran Child's boss fight will inevitably cause him to create a chain reaction of exploding cars that will 99% of the time freeze the game, it will lock up more often on the crazier end-game missions, (really any over the top usage of the black hole gun or tons of explosions cause a hard lock) and to top it off if you're an achievement/trophy hunter/completionist all versions have the achievement/trophy Where is my Cape? glitched to a point that if that glitch happens you must start a new game and follow a specific set of requirements while recollecting all 1,255 Data Clusters just to be able to buy every single super power to qualify for it and even if you followed those requirements the game more often than not won't give it to you. Have fun replaying the game over and over just for 100% or a Platinum Trophy!

Super Monkey Ball: Deluxe on the PS2 and Xbox may have levels and content from both the original games in one DVD, plus more, but both versions suffer from the controls not being anywhere as good from the GameCube versions. Worse yet for the PS2 version having some framerate issues and, with the PS2's hardware not being as powerful as the GameCube, graphics that don't look as good as the original.

PC Operating Systems

BreakThru, a jeep-based Shoot 'em Up by Data East, had three computer ports published by US Gold. The Commodore 64 version had dishwater-ugly backgrounds, stupid sound effects, terrible hit detection and enemy vehicles that did things like drive over water. The ZX Spectrum version had awkward keyboard controls, barely any sound, bad collision detection, and a lack of enemies, though the graphics weren't terrible for the system. The Amstrad CPC version had programming similar to the Spectrum version, but the game window was inexplicably much smaller; it received the lowest score for any game reviewed in AMTIX! magazine.

The game was ported by UK-based Binary Design to home computer platforms in 1988, who were ordered by Mastertronic (the publisher that commissioned them) to finish these ports under a strict deadline, resulting in most of them turning out to be total rushjobs. A common problem all of these ports shared was the fact that the developers attempted to adapt the arcade game's three-button combat system to work on one-button joysticks that were standard for PC gaming back then. This meant that instead of having dedicated buttons for kicking, jumping and punching, players only had a single fire button for everything and performing anything other than a standing punch required rather counter-intuitive joystick/button combinations (e.g. Down-Away+Fire for a backward whirlwind kick, Down-Forward+Fire for a jump kicks). The uppercut and roundhouse kicks were also missing in these versions, since enemies lacked their stunned animations — instead they simply fall down to the floor after a few hits. On top of all that, these versions had non-existent music and sound effects due to the floppy disk format they were released on.

The Amiga and Atari ST versions, with both of them running on 16-bit hardware, could've theoretically reproduced the arcade version's visuals — instead they feature laughably amateurish art assets in which all the male character (except the Abobos and Machine Gun Willy) are recolors of the same generic guy. The IBM PC version looked even worse, as it only supported the already dated CGA and EGA graphic cards. Double Dragon II and 3 fared better visually on these platforms (especially 3, which resembled the arcade version pretty closely), but still suffered from the aforementioned controls and sound issues.

The Commodore 64 version used a sprite stacking technique for its graphics that resulted in all the characters having an invisible waist. The manual for this version actually featured an apology and explanation from the developers for using this technique. When Ocean Software got the rights to re-release Double Dragon on the C64, they chose to create their own conversion instead of re-releasing the Binary Design one, which was considerably better looking, but was one-player only.

The Amstrad CPC actually had two versions of Double Dragon. The version distributed in the UK was based on the ZX Spectrum version, while the version distributed in other European countries such as France and Spain used art assets similar to the Amiga version and is generally regarded to be the better of the two versions, although it's only compatible with CPC 6128 models.

Salamander for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC (the latter being a cheap conversion of the former, as was all too often the case). The majority of the screen was taken up with the HUD. The action was slow — you don't get a speed up until halfway into the first level, and need it well before then. There are one or two bugs that make one of the boss battles a Luck-Based Mission. Only the first stage has an actual layout; the rest of them just have the odd enemy floating across the screen.

Street Fighter II received home computer ports of the original World Warrior for the western market in 1993.

Aside from the fact that World Warrior was already considered vestigial by that time (the 16-bit consoles were already receiving ports of the previous year's Champion Edition and Hyper Fighting editions), the conversions were all being handled by U.S. Gold, a company with a spotty track record when it came to porting arcade games to home computers.

The IBM PC port was a total trainwreck. Everybody moved like they were paralyzed, combos were impossible (the sprites were invincible while taking damage), if you won while in mid-air your character would stop and do his/her victory pose defying all rules of gravity, and there were only three songs — Ken's theme (which became the title theme), the character select theme (which was the only theme to play during gameplay at all) and Zangief's ending theme (which was now everyone's ending theme).

The C64 version had the large, detailed character sprites became tiny, unrecognizable messes of pixels and five-minute loads to move on to the next stage. On top of all that, instead of three-punch and three-kick buttons, it was played with a joystick which only had one button.

Turrican qualifies in every 8-bit computer version not on the C64 (the computer it was originally programmed for). Broken controls, choppy scrolling, and missing level features abound, and the graphics take strange liberties with the original material. Of course, this is probably more due to the computers' lack of hardware-accelerated sprites and scrolling (which the C64 had) than the programmers' incompetence, but one wonders why they attempted it at all. The exception is the Amstrad CPC version, which is well regarded and highly playable. Despite the scrolling and smaller game screen, the graphics are far better than the C64 graphics (but then the C64 has a horrendously drab palette to pick colors from). Still not sure why Turrican is green though when perfectly usable blues are available in the Amstrad palette and were used elsewhere in the games.

Rare non-game example: Ports of the Clam antivirus program to Microsoft Windows still do not have a real-time scanner. The original Unix versions started including a real-time scanner some years back, and the OS X version, while unable to get the original real-time scanner working, compensated with a completely rewritten real-time scanner called ClamXAV Sentry. However, the Windows version lacked this basic amenity, because apparently the devs lack the manpower to make a port and no one else cared.

While not a "disaster", per se, certain PC games around the early and mid-2000s (the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time trilogy and Need for Speed: Most Wanted 2005 spring to mind) have process threading issues on multi-core systems, which can cause jerky performance. This is because these games buffer information for preprocessing on the assumption of operating on a single-core system. In a multi-core environment, the process scheduler will grab queued threads and assign them to the cores for simultaneous processing. This in turn screws up things like order of execution and output scheduling, which the games aren't coded to handle, hence the jerkiness due to having to compensate for possible out of order data (and can occasionally cause crashes if the engine doesn't handle it right). The solution is to typically shut off all but one core for the game's executable to run its requests through (this can be done at runtime in the Task Manager or by using a hex patcher to modify the game executable directly).

The Steam releases of Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI are direct ports of the mobile versions, which have clunky interfaces that weren't meant for PC gaming. Entire chunks of the battle screen are taken up by needlessly huge menu options, and although the "run" and "fast-forward battle" icons had their functionality removed and assigned to keys/buttons, they inexplicably weren't removed from the interface. On top of that, Final Fantasy VI had bad lag, sound problems, and it couldn't even be played in offline mode. The issues were resolved quickly, but the clunky interface remained.

Jet Set Radio's Steam port only lets you configure keyboard controls, and it was a straight port of the X360 port (a port of a port), thus using the 360 buttons as reference (e.g. "Hold down LT to center the camera"). You can, in fact, use a controller, but the controls will most likely be screwed up (for example, if using a PS3 controller, the A button will be Triangle, or the Start button will be R2), and there is no option to configure them anywhere. If you want to have proper gamepad support, you will either have to download a controller program like MotionInJoy or you will have to download a fan-made patch. Emphasis on fan-made patch. The Steam version of the game also infamously and inexplicably refuses to save on some copies. Re-downloading it... doesn't really help, and the main way of fixing it is to use a hex editor to modify the executable file. Even that doesn't always work.

A tie-in for the film Beverly Hills Cop was released on 4 platforms: Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and PC. The Amiga version has smashing music due to the Paula audio chip. The Atari ST and C64 version was bearable thanks to the PSG sound system. The PC version, however, is this trope play straight. Using only EGA graphics and PC speaker sound, despite the AdLib and Game Blaster, and indeed the first generation Sound Blaster, being already released when the game came out and VGA was already picking up steam. And even then the PC music was often described as someone strangling an ice cream truck.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy